


Dragon-born and Far Star Marked

by Space (aussieosbourne)



Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Anxiety, Banter, Dragonborn DLC, F/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Saldas is weirdly introspective and thinks about the past a lot, Slow Burn, Trust Issues, emotional isolation, lots of references to previous games, some lore and culture speculation, survivor's guilt, this might end up a bit lore-heavy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2017-06-23
Packaged: 2018-08-14 11:44:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 30,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8012389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aussieosbourne/pseuds/Space
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"One and one, eleven, an inelegant number. Which of the ones is the more important? Could you ever tell if they switched places?"</i><br/>- The Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec: Sermon Eleven</p><p>She is Dovah-kiin, dragon-born, a word that was once used to describe himself, many years ago. They have both carved out an existence from the stone on which their destiny was written.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

1.

He hears his name above the music.

He had seen a nord push through the door and shake the snow from her hair, but he had not thought to give her more than a mild glance. It was not particularly unusual, or even really worth his attention, until Ambarys so readily offered his name across the bar — his full name, so he must have still been pissed about their little tiff this morning.

He grits his teeth, but he is smart enough to hold his tongue. He digs the bone needle into the hide gambeson laid across his lap. Pulls the stitch tight. Waits for her to approach.

She is quiet on her feet in full armor, and that alone is enough to set his nerves on edge. She appears at the other side of the table, hands folded politely over the back of the chair, and she waits.

The silence lasts until she decides he is not going to acknowledge her presence. “Saldas Irelor?”

He snorts. “Ambarys is gonna get me killed one of these days if he keeps that up.”

She tilts her head. “What?”

“Giving my name out to strangers. I'm surprised he even talked to you. He's not exactly fond of nords, if you hadn't noticed.”

“I'd gathered as much,” she relents, with a bite of sarcasm that tells him she had gotten an earful already. “Should I expect the same of you?”

The question is a small barb, but she puts no heat behind it. Resignation, more like. “No,” he says, thoughtfully, and then, “—because I'm not an _idiot_ ,” just loud enough for Ambarys to scowl at him. He motions at the chair across from him. “Sit. What's your business?”

She nods gratefully, adjusts her axe at her hip as she takes a seat. She drops a fat sack of coin on the table, and this is enough to finally secure his attention.

A couple pairs of hungry eyes flit over momentarily at the sound, then drift away. His hands cease their idle mending, and he hesitantly meets her eyes.

She is just watching him, patiently leaning on the table by her elbows, hands folded. She does not flinch away from eye contact. Most nords will avoid it like a plague, he has found — the red eyes unnerve them, too much like blood and fire. Her eyes unnerve _him_ , white-blue like he has only ever seen on old-blood nords, clear as wet glacier ice. He is certain she feels the same unease, though she does not show it plainly. Just the tiniest telling twitch in her cheek when he leveled his eyes at her.

He holds her gaze for a solid ten seconds before he is satisfied. She is not afraid of him. Good.

He sets his gambeson aside and pulls open the purse, furrowing his brow. He pushes some coins around inside with one finger. “This is all gold.”

“All of five hundred pieces.”

That is easily enough to buy a pack horse and all the tack, or a new set of good armor. It is _not_ a measly amount of coin to be waving around this part of Windhelm. He pulls it closed again, giving her a wary once-over. “What _exactly_ do you need from me? I'm not a mercenary.”

“I know. I need a guide.”

He narrows his eyes at her. “For?”

“I'm going to Solstheim.”

“Not on holiday, I assume?”

She rolls her eyes, but a smirk tugs at her lips. “For _reasons_. I'd prefer not too many questions, if you don't mind.”

He leans back in his chair and crosses his arms. “I'll need a little more gold than that for silence. I generally like to know what I'm risking my neck for.”

“Name your price,” she offers without missing a beat.

It sounds like a challenge — personal, then. Probably dangerous.

He does not budge. And then, just to see if she will do it, “Two and a half. I didn't get to be this old running blindly into danger.”

She nods, _fair enough_ in the quirk of her lips. Drops another bag on the table. He does not have to rifle through it to know it's legitimate.

Something tells him she is not just an idiot child with no concept of the value of a septim, either. She watches him, waits for a reaction. Calculating.

He pushes the first bag back toward her, and notes the confusion in her face with a small measure of amusement. “Keep it. The silence goes both ways.”

He takes the half portion, weighs it in his palm, and stuffs it in his pack. “Handle food and lodging if we need it. Maybe help with supplies if I'm short... I take it this isn't going to be just a couple of days?”

“Not likely,” she confirms, hesitantly stashing the other bag.

He nods, gathering his unfinished gambeson and rolling it tight. “Didn't think so. We'll talk about continued payment at the end of... say, four weeks?”

She nods, watching as he stuffs his belongings in his pack. “Sounds good.”

“When are we leaving?”

“Morning, preferably.”

He cringes a little. “I hope you're not planning to go in _that_. If there's an ash storm when we get there you're gonna have more than a little dust in your crevices to worry about.”

She wrinkles her nose at this. “Any better ideas?”

“Yeah. A better scarf. Come on, then. The shop ’ll be closed in probably half an hour.”

He stands, and shoulders his pack. There is a little flash of anxiety on her face, a sharp intake of breath — he is puzzled for a moment before he remembers he is _tall_ , even in a city full of nords. He must have been slouching in his chair again, to catch her off-guard like that.

To a child of Skyrim, he is probably everything her parents taught her to avoid, worn and tattooed and perpetually scowling. Granted, he has not always been so unapproachable, but it has been quite a few decades since strangers stopped trying to make conversation.

Blatant _fear,_ on the other hand, is new. He is not sure how to feel about this development.

He makes sure not to face her fully, standing with his shoulder to her so she is not eclipsed by a brick wall of dunmer. If she notices his small concession, she does not show it in anything more than the slight release of tension from her posture.

She makes a point to push in her chair before they leave, and wipe away the melted snow on the table. He does not think he has ever seen a human with manners in the cornerclub. That is a good sign, if nothing else.

“It’s Ingrid, by the way,” she adds without looking at him, wiping her palm on her cloak. “Figured you’d need to know.”

He gives a noncommittal hum in response, and then, “Just _Ingrid_?”

There is a hesitation, only noticeable in the rigid line of her shoulders. “Aye.”

He nods, and recognizes a space to be filled with silence. “Come on, we’re burning daylight.”


	2. Chapter 2

2.

They travel in relative silence.

Ingrid had initially not understood why she would be needing so many adjustments to her wardrobe. He had picked out a secondhand set of netch leathers for her at Revyn’s shop, chitin goggles and a heavy woven face-wrap — she still stubbornly insisted on wearing her armor over the leathers, but he supposed that couldn’t hurt. When they pulled into port and had to duck through swirling cyclones of ash, she expressed nothing but gratitude when they made it safely into the Retching Netch.

If nothing else, she is adaptable. Which is absolutely not to say she is _nothing else_ — she is an extremely capable warrior, which Saldas finds out the moment she cleaves the head clean off a reaver before his sword can come down on his shoulder. As the blade tumbles backwards out of the reaver’s hand and he nearly feels his knees give, she reaches out and steadies him with a firm grip. She fixes him with a solid, searching look — tips her chin at him in an unspoken _you okay?_ — and he swallows hard, replies with a tight nod of his own.

She doesn't coddle him, doesn't press. Despite his reservations, he realizes she is not a half bad companion, either.

They do not speak of anything with substance, not even feeling the edges of their boundaries, and that suits him just fine. Much of their shared time is spent in easy silence.

At first, he cannot figure out what it is she has come to Solstheim to do. Her questions are many, but vague. The most he has gathered within the first two weeks is that she is looking for a _person_ , at least. He knows there are hermits in the hills, and he tells her so, but she simply shakes her head, staring off into the brewing ash storm without explanation. It is maddening, but he is not one to break a promise, even an unspoken one.

And then, one morning, he awakes to her shambling wordlessly out of their shared tent.

It is the barest asscrack of dawn, the sky just now starting to become more orange along the horizon than the purple-grey of the passing night. Though the ash in the sky keeps snow at bay, it is absolutely _frigid_ , a sickly wet cold that clings to his skin — enough that it was actually the absence of her body heat that roused him, rather than her stirring.

And there Ingrid is, shuffling out into the clearing in a thin tunic and linen trousers.

He is awake and out of his bedroll before the tent flaps swing shut, stumbling after her in not nearly enough clothing, himself. The frozen ground is like broken glass on his bare feet. She does not seem to hear him, though he is not making an effort not to be heard; he calls her name and she does not respond.

He catches up in a few long strides, and stands in front of her, blocking her with his body — he tries to get her attention, but she is staring sightlessly right through him, as if he is nothing but a pane of glass. With each step, he is forced to shuffle backward, unwilling to simply grab her and pin her in place.

There are words tumbling from her mouth, quiet and detached, and he has to strain to hear — the syllables are tripping and broken, even on her nordic tongue, but he recognizes some of the words. He suddenly realizes what _this_ is.

“Ingrid,” he says again, softer, apologetic as he draws a small blade from the scabbard around his calf. “You’ll have to forgive me for this.”

He grabs her by the wrist and flicks the blade across the meat of her forearm, careful to be quick but not to cut deeply. The laceration is small, but it bleeds — she blinks, abruptly lucid, and recoils.

“Ingrid,” he begins, cautiously holding his hands out as if approaching an injured animal, “—before you jump to conclusions, I need you to listen to me.”

Her eyes go to the blade, and to the cut in her arm, and he knows she will likely kill him for this. “What in Oblivion is going on?”

“Something strange has been happening on this island,” he explains, quickly, careful to keep at least an arm’s length between them. “You were almost a victim of it. People have—”

In her face, he sees a sabercat baring its fangs. “ _You_ —”

“—damn it, woman, would you _please listen to me,_ ” he hisses, and, against his better judgement, presses the handle of his knife into her palm. “If you want to return the favour, I won’t stop you, but you need to _listen._ ”

The gesture takes the wind out of her sails. She blinks dumbly at the dagger.

“People have been disappearing in the night. They wander off in the small hours of the morning and inexplicably wander right back into their beds before anyone notices they’re gone. Nobody remembers anything. Nobody seems to even notice it’s _happening,_ except for me. I’ve seen it with Milore, with Fethis, with fucking _Teldryn_ , of all people,” he growls, irately ticking them off on his fingers, “and _you_ were doing just the same.”

She is staring through him, but nodding as he speaks. “What of this, then?” she asks, and waves the dagger at him feebly, still tipped with her own blood.

“That’s the only way I’ve found to stop it. I had to do the same to Teldryn when he tried to wander off. Drawing blood seems to break the trance.”

“You couldn’t’ve just socked me?” she asks, and though she still seems unsteady, she attempts a wry smile.

He gives her a look of disapproval, and she sighs, offering him his dagger back. The blood has cut jagged red streaks down her forearm, and there are droplets spattering the ash below. She does not even seem to notice.

“Speaking of,” he grumbles under his breath, taking her by the elbow and stepping closer. He gathers a spell in his hand and gently presses his palm to the wound, and the raw edges slowly knit together.

He glances up when she sighs slowly through her nose, and finds her looking more disappointed than angry, her thick golden brows furrowed together.

“I _am_ sorry about this, by the way,” he offers, but she shakes her head.

“Don’t be. You did what you had to do.”

“Doesn’t mean I don’t regret _having_ to.”

At this, she nods thoughtfully. “Has it happened to you?”

“It has. I woke standing, knee-deep in water with a hammer in my hand.”

She gives him a quizzical look.

“The shrine outside town,” he explains. “I assume you’ve noticed it.”

“That lattice they’re building around the great green stone? Yes, I’ve noticed, but I didn’t think anything of it.”

“Yeah, and apparently neither does anyone else, even though they’re the ones building the thrice-damned thing.”

This admission alarms her. She is silent while he wipes the blood away with his thumbs, checking his handiwork. The cut is now no more than a narrow scar, barely an inch long and stark white on her tanned skin. He glances up, and finds her watching him, suddenly looking oddly pale.

“You say it’s a shrine?”

“Yes.”

“To who?”

“I don’t know,” he admits, using his tunic to wipe the blood from between his fingers. “But that’s where people go when they wander off. They’re always chanting something, but I can’t understand a lick of it — the only word I can pick out is _shrine_ , and that’s only because I’ve been a student of religion nearly as long as I’ve been alive — and _that_ means they’re speaking ancient Atmoran, of all fucking things.”

“So...”

“So whatever it is that’s dragging them blindly away in the night is very very old, and _very_ powerful — and as much as I’d _like_ to stop it, well... let’s be honest, I’d be hilariously out of my league, so I’d rather not tangle with it.”

This means something to her. More than it meant to him, it seems, by the look of abject horror on her face when he finally looks up to meet her eyes.

And then, it clicks.

“Oh, Azura have fucking mercy,” he groans, “that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”


	3. Chapter 3

3.

Two days later, they’re running low on supplies, and they are forced to return to town.

They have been combing the southwest quarter of the island for the past two and a half weeks, and have found nothing more than reavers and hordes upon hordes of ash spawn. Ingrid has gone in alone to explore a handful of ruins along the way, but Saldas waited outside upon her orders. Each time, she came out with a heavier pack and a faceful of drying scabs, disappointment etched into her entire frame. He does not ask, because he has been asked not to. Instead, he offers a mug of warm mazte and sits by her side until she feels like walking again.

They come upon the bulwark warmed by the last rays of afternoon sun. The air is frigid when they dip below the shadow of the wall; beside him, Ingrid bundles tighter into her bearskin cloak. The fur is caked with ash, wet and dried several times over and matted with flecks of gore.

The last few days have been harrowing, and they both look worse for the wear. Ingrid is huddled in her soiled cloak up to her soot-stained ruddy cheeks, the blood crusted in her nostrils a reminder that her body is not made to withstand the ash in the air. Saldas is so thoroughly coated in grime that his hair is likely more grey than red, his hands blistered and hastily bandaged in wickwheat-soaked muslin. Both are aching from their toes to the tops of their heads.

Past the bulwark, though, it is less miserable. The two Redoran guards posted at the city's entrance offer Saldas a few light words in greeting, and even nod to Ingrid as they pass. Milore and her husband wave amicably in the distance. Paper lanterns swing lazily on their ropes, bathing the entire street in orange. It very faintly brings to mind memories of distant winter evenings in Ald’ruhn, back when life was simpler and the weight on his shoulders considerably lighter. He almost misses being called _outlander_ forty times a day — doesn’t quite miss the damned cliff racers, though.

The last few minutes of sunlight are just enough to get them inside the doors of the Netch with some warmth still in their bones.

There are sailors in the upper anteroom, their voices echoing above the din in a way that dunmer’s voices do not. One of them nods to Ingrid, drunkenly slurring, “Hail, kinsman!” and she laughs, soft and easy, returning the greeting with a raised palm.

He has always been puzzled by the solidarity nords seem to have between strangers, but the years have made it more endearing than strange. It is the first he has ever seen her laugh. He finds himself somewhat relieved to discover she is not entirely broken by whatever she left behind in Skyrim.

They have not spoken more of her mission since the incident two nights prior. Ingrid was clearly mortified by the whole ordeal, so he did not press further, if only to honour their deal. She did not seem inclined to bring him along on any of her more secretive — usually subterranean — endeavors, so he doubted the lack of information would harm him, so long as he stayed out of her way.

But the blood of a scholar runs in his veins, so he is perpetually drawn to knowledge like a moth to flame. He briefly considers offering her a piece of his own past as a sort of trade. Something harmless to let her know that he is not, in fact, made of glass, and has certainly seen equal or worse horrors than what she is currently facing. But these are foolish thoughts, selfish thoughts, so he holds his tongue.

She seems to sense his internal squirming, and occasionally offers small apologies, usually in the form of sujamma or mazte. It is a means of barter that he gratefully accepts, and she knows this, so she takes frequent advantage — strong liquor in exchange for his patience.

He does not have the heart to tell her that she does not actually _need_ to barter for his patience, as he would willingly give it anyway. But if someone pours him a drink, he is not likely to turn it down.

Geldis sees them approach from his seat behind the bar and pauses in drying the mug in his hands. He is younger than Saldas by half a century, but he has never told him that, and he would not be likely to believe him if he did. There are deep wrinkles at the corners of his eyes — the same narrow eyes as his cousin in Windhelm — and they crinkle up when he smiles at them, waving a hand to beckon them closer.

“Saldas—serjo—good to see you back in one piece,” he says, nodding to each of them in turn. Ingrid tips her head politely in return, and wanders off while they speak.

 _“How is the ash, these days?”_ Geldis asks, slipping comfortably into Dunmeris now that he is not catering to foreign ears.

“ _Excellent at getting into all the worst places, as usual._ I've got the coin if you've got a room and a bath.”

They do this on occasion, navigating both of the island's predominant languages within the same breath — though it is usually only in mixed company, to keep curious ears out of their business. Carrying several conversations at once comes as easy to them as breathing.

His mother always said it was a trick that Mephala the Webspinner taught to the dunmer before they were known by that name, when they were still the golden-skinned and golden-eyed disciples of Saint Veloth. Say your piece, but give the busybodies something to distract themselves with — mislead them or bore them to death, whatever suits your fancy.

 _Cleverness keeps us safe,_ she had once said while plaiting his tangled red hair at the kitchen table. _It is the same reason we wear armor beneath our cloaks. If our enemies cannot see the weak points in our armor, they do not know where to aim. What they do not know cannot hurt you._

Nowadays, it has become more habit than anything. He trusts Geldis as much as he is able. They are both considered friendly among dunmer, but they are neither trusting nor foolish — if anything, they consider themselves friends only because years of shared hardship have stripped away any pretense there might have once been.

As such, he reads the hesitance in Geldis’ expression and immediately realizes there is a problem. To his credit, he does at least attempt to look apologetic. “Actually... I'm all booked tonight. Weather's shit over toward Windhelm, so Gjalund and his crew are staying in.”

The sailors upstairs. “Of course,” he sighs, and drags a hand through his filthy hair.

 _“Hey, why not—?”_ he makes a vague gesture in the direction of the stairs, and Saldas catches his meaning, though he doesn’t like it. He glances wearily to Ingrid, who has settled into a table with a haggard-faced dunmer woman he doesn't recognize. She is politely ignoring the woman’s scrutinizing stare, pretending to be very interested in the carvings on her axe.

He shakes his head. _“You know how I am with bringing people into my house.”_

Geldis winces. “ _Right. I forgot._ I wish I could help you out, sera.” Saldas hears the unspoken _might not have a choice tonight_ and silently agrees.

“It’s alright, old friend, I’ll survive,” he relents, and he knows Geldis well enough to know that he will not take offense to his tone.

“Good. Now get the hell out of my bar, you smell like a guar’s moldering ass.”

 

He boils water for a bath the moment they get inside, and he lets Ingrid bathe first. It is less out of hospitality than to have a moment to explain the situation to Teldryn, who, infuriatingly, is amused by the whole ordeal.

He cackles like an overfed fox when Saldas insists that _this is serious, you damned fool_ , but he does at least hear him out.

“Well, she seems to be well-mannered. Tell her to keep her nose out of your business, and she might very well listen. It’s only for a few days, at most.” Teldryn cracks a sly grin, prodding him with his stocking feet. “Look at it this way, we get to share a bed. It'll be just like old times.”

“Words cannot express how much I hate you,” he says with a small measure of fondness, already feeling the exhaustion slowly taking him. Perhaps he can snatch a few moments of rest before bathing.

As soon as his eyes slip shut, Ingrid's voice echoes brightly down the stairs.

“Bath's free.”

Saldas heaves a heavy, dramatic sigh and excuses himself before Teldryn can mime any more lewd gestures in his direction.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As a note, if a sentence or phrase in this fic's dialogue is in full italics, it's probably in Dunmeris unless stated otherwise. Saldas speaks the Empire's bastardized version of Nibenese Cyrodilic (or Tamrielic, as some call it), which I headcanon as the primary trade language due to the very trade-focused aspects of Nibenese culture. I do take a bit of inspiration from Hrafnir's Languages (for those of you who are familiar with the Imperial-Library community) but the majority of this is just me being self-indulgent with linguistics.


	4. Chapter 4

4.

They sit side-by-side on the docks in the warmth of the morning sun, scrubbing down each piece of their armor and mending whatever their skills allow. With spring fast approaching, there are more opportunities to perform maintenance outside, and Saldas seizes those opportunities with gratitude.

Ingrid does not even bother to wear a heavier garment over her linens, acclimated as she is to the cold, and he envies her that. Though it is an unusually mild morning for this time of year, he still shivers under his cloak. Even on Vvardenfell, he chose to live in the jungles of the Bitter Coast — skinny and warm-blooded as he is, he never even managed to get used to the relative cold in Sheogorad. The cold of _this_ blighted island is a whole different beast.

The sun on his ash-grey hands keeps the chill from seeping into his joints while he works. He scrubs at his breastplate, checking each junction for fractures as he passes over them with his rough-woven cloth.

Some pieces have been replaced over the years — evident in the faint lines where newer, cleaner material meets the original — but he tries to keep the majority of the pieces as intact as possible, properly cleaning and sealing the surface whenever he has a chance. The tribe that molded this armor was likely wiped out centuries ago, between the invasion of the daedra and Red Mountain’s fury. It feels right to keep a piece of them alive.

Ingrid's cuirass is cracked badly in the center of the back, but he does not remember her ever taking a palpable hit. He voices as much, and she grunts _draugr_ as she scrubs the fastenings with a hard-bristled brush. He has never seen one, himself, but he has heard stories, and he cannot fathom a withered corpse putting a crack that size in solid metal.

He’s got half a mind to ask — but then he gets a glimpse of green-gold under the wine coloured paint where it has flaked off surrounding the crack. Suddenly, surprised at himself for not noticing it before, he realizes that he _knows_ that design. He recognizes the shape of the engraved breastplate, and the unique way the cuirass is segmented through the midsection.

The handiwork is Aldmeri, and does not know what to think of such a piece being in Ingrid's possession.

After a moment, he gives in to his curiosity. “Is that elven armor?”

There is a flicker of something approaching fear in her eyes when she snaps to look at him. He briefly wonders if he has crossed a line, but she looks away before he can apologize, returning to her work with renewed fervor.

“Yes,” she says, and leaves it at that. There is no anger in her eyes, only ill-concealed dread. He wonders if his initial impression had been wrong, if she truly is afraid of him, after all.

This is another valley to be stepped over rather than delved into, but a sudden nagging doubt settles in the back of his mind.

He tells himself that he does not need to know. The doubt persists.

He knows she is not a Thalmor spy. That is not what troubles him, and he hopes she does not believe that that is the conclusion he has drawn. He only wonders how deeply her axe would fit into that space.

Though he wishes to press the matter, he knows he is lucky to have received an honest answer at all. He returns to scraping dried blood out of the crevices of his breastplate.

“Might want to get that crack taken care of,” he ventures, carefully. “It'll only get worse.”

In his peripherals, he sees her watching him. She says nothing. She is picking him apart, he thinks. Prying at his walls to search for something.

He does not acknowledge it, and after a long moment, she returns to her work as well.

It is not an easy silence they settle into, but it is comfortable enough that they finish their work and walk back to his home together.

 

He sets aside some time to mix potions before night grows too near. Some of his supply has spoiled in their absence, much to his frustration. He had not anticipated this newest development, of being a hireling for the first time in at least a hundred years, and would not risk visiting his home before he had a good impression of his new employer's character and intentions. Thus, he hadn’t had time to clear out or preserve his stock before leaving town for half a month. Consequently, the more delicate and perishable ingredients have suffered for it.

During their stay, Ingrid politely avoided entering further into the house than necessary. He had allowed her to use the grindstone to maintain her equipment, which still confined her to the upper anteroom and the forward third of the downstairs hall, as he had let her use Teldryn’s room. Curiously enough, she had shown interest in his work. But she would not cross the invisible line into his space, hovering just inside the armory alcove to watch from a distance. He would have expressed thanks, if it was not exactly what he expected of her.

For now, he has the house to himself. Teldryn is out at the Netch, and Ingrid had pressing business in Raven Rock that did not require his presence, so he elected to stay behind. He does not care to drink the night before travelling, and Ingrid’s business does not concern him. It just gives him time to collect his thoughts before they retire for the night.

Above a low flame, he steeps sprigs of wheat and blue mountain flowers in water. The wheat grown in the frigid soil of Skyrim is just as potent as wickwheat, but more bitter and fibrous than the supple plants that carpet the plains of Morrowind. He prefers to use it for topical applications, but it is far preferable to the other local options — sabercat’s eyes and charred skeever are not what he would describe as _potable_ — so he makes do with what he has, now that he has run out of his supply of wickwheat.

He would have preferred crushed marshmerrow to any kind of wheat, but this is nothing more than wishful thinking. With the majority of the Ascadian Isles still existing as little more than a water-filled crater, the greatest source of the plant is now the non-native crop grown in the eastern peninsula of the mainland. The plant is scrubbier and the pulp more rubbery in texture than the ones that once grew wild in the grazelands, and the alchemical properties are far less potent. It serves more as a sweetener than a viable ingredient for potions. Raven Rock has neither the money nor the demand for such a thing, so it has been many years since he has had access to it.

It is pitiful, really, how fervently he longs for the little things he once took for granted. In truth, he just misses not having to choke down his healing potions.

The front door opens while he strips fibers from the seedheads of another handful of wheat. Cold air pillows down the stairs and across his bare ankles, and he very nearly snaps at whoever has entered to close the damned door — but he recognizes Ingrid’s light footsteps, and tamps down his mounting frustration before the words come out. The door is closed before he can grow too irritable, anyway. One of these days, he needs to lay some drapes across the top of that stairway to keep the heat in.

“Permission to come aboard?” she asks brightly, and she is attempting a joke, but he can hear the exhaustion in her voice as it echoes down the stairs.

Still, he chuckles at the attempt. “Granted. Everything went well, I take it?”

She groans aloud, and he hears her slump into a chair. “Is that Redoran councilor always so difficult?”

He almost asks which one she is referring to, before he realizes that he knows _exactly_ which one she means. “Adril Arano?” he asks with a grin of amusement she cannot see beyond the wall, cracking seedheads with a flat stone. “He is a bit prickly when you first meet him, isn’t he?”

“Prickly as a patch of briars,” she agrees, and he hears the cork pop loose from a jug of liquor.

“He means well.”

“He looks at me as if I’ve just threatened to snatch his coin purse,” she grouses, and he almost laughs, because he has been on the receiving end of that glare on more than one occasion.

“It’s his job to be suspicious. Don’t take it personally,” he advises. “You got what you needed, though, didn’t you?”

She barks a laugh. “Hardly. You were right.”

“I’m right about a great many things. You’ll have to be more specific, serjo.”

He can practically feel her rolling her eyes. “Nobody has a clue what’s going on. With the shrines, with Miraak, with _anything_.”

The name rings a bell. Or, more accurately, an alarm. “Miraak, you say?”

His hearing is not what it used to be, but he swears he hears her curse vehemently under her breath, lost in the sound of boiling water. She has given more information than she had intended, it seems.

He carefully removes the pot from the fire. “Ingrid, come here a moment.”

There are several long beats of silence before he hears the chair creak under her weight, and bare feet appear at the top of the stairs.

He turns to the bookshelf, running his fingers along the spines of volumes both new and weathered. She is watching him carefully as she approaches, apprehension written all throughout her rigid posture.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he sighs irritably, finding himself rankled that she would even assume such a thing. To his knowledge, he has not done anything to make himself a threat. Maybe she is just as broken as he is, seeing danger where it does not exist.

When he finds the book he is looking for, he tips it backward from where it is wedged tightly between two larger tomes, and wiggles it free.

Ingrid stops before the invisible line, even when she has been given an invitation. He holds the book out to her — but before her hand closes around it, he tips it upward, earning himself a comical pout of disapproval.

“Do you read Cyrodilic?”

She rolls her eyes. “Yes.”

“Good. Then this may be of some use to you.”

When he places the book in her hands, she holds it delicately, as if she has been presented with a crystal platter. He watches with quiet amusement as she turns it over in her hands. She tilts her head to read the spine rather than tilting the book itself, and he is surprised by an unbidden swell of endearment that bubbles up in his chest at the sight.

“The Guardian and the Traitor,” she reads aloud, brow furrowed in confusion. The sound of her voice, loud in the relative silence of the hall, reminds him that he has forgotten to explain. Thankfully, she is too absorbed in the first page of the book to notice.

“Read it,” he orders, gently. “It doesn’t hold very much meaning to me, being ignorant of the significance. But given your knowledge of the situation, it might offer some unique insight into this... _Miraak_ you’re looking for.”

Her fingers reverently trace the margins. “Thank you,” she whispers, as if she is embarrassed to say it.

He wishes he could leave it at this.

It pains him to break a promise, particularly one whose gravity he fully and intimately understands. But he cannot hold his silence, now that he knows the cost.

“Ingrid... I know we agreed on _no questions_ _,_ but I believe this is important.”

She goes rigid again, slowly closing the book. He recognizes fear —  never anger, always fear — and when she opens her mouth to speak, he raises a hand to silence her.

“I don't want to know what it means to you, or how you factor into it. For all I know, you’re just a concerned citizen trying to do the right thing.”

She closes her mouth without speaking, unable to meet his eyes. But she is listening, and that is all he needs right now.

“Believe me when I say I understand your need for secrecy. Truly, I do. If it was any other situation, I would never seriously consider going back on my word. But you _need_ to understand that this affects me and all of those people out there in Raven Rock, as well. I have watched my home be destroyed more than once, and each time I was powerless to stop it. I _will not_ see it happen again.”

This admission, though it reveals very little, visibly wounds her.

“If you want us both to get out of this alive, we need to be on the same page. If I don't even know what you're looking for, I can't do much more than lead you in circles. You need direction, not someone to hold your hand while you wander aimlessly through the ash.”

He fully expects her to refuse.

But she does not.


	5. Chapter 5

5.

The crack is still there when they suit up to leave town, like a gaping wound nestled between her shoulderblades.

He offers to take her cuirass to the smith for her, perhaps have him hammer away the places where it has warped so it does not press into her spine, but she declines. The shadow that descends upon her expression is enough to silence any further offers.

Idly, she picks at the paint where it is peeling. He does not understand how she can willingly leave herself with such a significant handicap. It seems oddly self-destructive for a woman who has proven herself to be sensible. He _could_ insist — he does not fear retribution, he is practically twice her size — but there is something faraway in her eyes that he recognizes, and it unsettles him.

Perhaps she is punishing herself for something, the same way he is punishing himself by being on this thrice-cursed island in the first place.

When her armor is firmly secured and the mostly-clean bearskins laid overtop, she offers him a forced smile, though she still does not meet his eyes for very long.

“Lead the way,” she says, with a hollowness in her voice that suggests she will be uncommunicative for a while once they have made it beyond the bulwark. He nods affirmation, and they walk.

When she had described what Second Councilor Arano had told her, it reminded him too much of his own thoughts surrounding Miraak, muddled and fractured, a collection of fragments. Nothing definitive.

He had not even realized just how much he had forgotten until he felt the memories dancing around in his head, just out of reach. How many times had he actually slipped away in the night? There were only two occasions he could recall, both because Teldryn had woken with the sound of his stirring and put a stop to it — how many times had he not been so lucky? Is he really as resistant to control as he thought?

He wore his disquiet plainly on his face, if her expression was anything to go by. He assured her he was fine, but she did not seem convinced. He spent the remainder of the night awake and troubled, poring over faded tomes and trying not to think about the parallels.

He does not want to go into this blind. If anyone has more information, it is probably Neloth — if there is something dangerous or forbidden hiding on this island, he would bet a hundred septims that old bastard at least knows about it. Or, realistically, is already elbow-deep in its workings.

The only problem is Ingrid. Bringing her to Tel Mithryn is not without risk, particularly of a personal nature. Neloth is one of only a handful of people who knew him before, when he was still whole. Still _himself._

Granted, they were only the faintest of acquaintances in that era. Saldas can admit that he only bears with Neloth’s deplorable personality because the old wizard reminds him of home. Call it self-indulgence, if you will.

Neloth, on the other hand, merely tolerates his presence and irreverent attitude out of bruised pride. Upon their first meeting in Tel Mithryn, Neloth had let slip a lengthy string of praises for the Nerevarine before he had actually bothered to cast him more than a disinterested glance — too young to remember the Nerevarine, _indeed,_ you old s’wit — and the look on his face when he finally _looked_ and _realized_ was something Saldas wishes he could set down permanently on canvas.

Neloth’s callous and self-absorbed demeanor was something he had been exposed to at their first meeting — their _actual_ first meeting back in Sadrith Mora, brief and terse as it had been — so he is not particularly affronted by it. He disagrees with nearly everything that comes out of the mad old tyrant’s mouth, but he is at least not surprised by it.

He only hopes nothing _compromising_ comes out of his mouth when he brings Ingrid to meet him.

He is well aware that he is little more than a shell of who he used to be. He shouldn’t care what she thinks of him, but part of him does not want her to realize just how far he has fallen.

 

They follow the coast toward the east, but do not walk too close to the surf. They stick close to the trees, following the edge of the bluff where the sea-grass grows. Ingrid does not speak for a long time. She does not seem to be angry with him, but she is pensive, and he cannot help but wonder what occupies her mind.

There are a few altercations with ash spawn, but the two of them are quick and ruthless enough to dispatch the creatures before they’ve fully formed. When he kicks an ash hopper in the face and sends it sprawling, cursing colourfully in Dunmeris, she finally cracks. He heaves a petulant sigh while she howls with laughter, clutching her stomach with her axe still in-hand. She does _not_ laugh when he informs her that the crumpled and still-twitching ash hopper is going to be their dinner.

They come upon Fort Frostmoth at dusk. Rather than swinging behind, farther inland, he takes them directly over the docks. He cleared the place out half a year ago, and though there are still ash spawn littering the wastes, none have tried to move in on the vacant stronghold.

They are both weary of sleeping outside, and though he would much rather not revisit the place, he agrees to set up camp indoors at Ingrid’s insistence.

The air inside is as stale as he remembered. While Ingrid kicks ash out of the fireplace, he topples an empty bookshelf face-down onto the floor to serve as a makeshift bed. He shakes out their furs and arranges them as comfortably as he can manage before helping her with dinner.

There are some signs of recent inhabitants. The footprints in the ash have the faint ghosts of paw pads  — he assumes they belong to the cathay-raht hermit who wanders the island, which is a relief if it is true; it means they are not likely to be murdered in their sleep if she returns before morning. He has never gotten to the point of friendliness with her, a fact that is aided by her halting, broken Dunmeris and his pitifully childish grasp of Ta’agra, but she is similar enough to himself in philosophy to avoid any misunderstandings — leave her alone, give her the respect she demands, and she will respond in kind. She has become something of a good omen to him, a stabilizing force among all the bizarre nonsense on this island. Her presence here would probably explain the continued lack of ash spawn in the area.

Though he has never been one to voice his raw thoughts, he explains all of this to Ingrid while they wait for the dried horker to boil down — _no giant bugs, after all?_ she asks, and he snorts despite himself — and it was not intended to be anything more than background noise, but she watches intently while he speaks, and she listens.

While he thinks the information to be mostly trivial — it _is_ trivial, otherwise he would not be rattling on about it in the first place — she still seems to be filing it all away, just as she does when he speaks of storms or herbs. Her quiet attentiveness is not something he is accustomed to. Of course, he is not accustomed to undivided attention in any form. He cannot decide if he finds her politeness respectful, or simply childlike.

In either case, he is so rarely offered such politeness that he does not know what to do with it when it _is_ given — he forgets to continue for a moment, and she fills the space before he can fumble for words or lapse back into silence.

“How long’ve you lived here?” she asks, busying her hands at cutting dried leeks, catching the pieces in a bowl on her lap.

He considers evading the question. He could, easily, on account of the fact that she would not believe him if he _did_ tell her the truth. He could pass for forty, on a good day.

He settles for, “A while.”

“Gathered that,” she laughs. “How many years, though? Ten? Twenty?”

“More along the lines of seventy,” he mumbles.

For a moment, he thinks she might drop the food in her hands, but she thankfully does not — however, her wide-eyed stare is more than enough to make him regret telling the truth.

“You don’t even look that old.”

“Elves don’t age like humans,” he grunts, and it is a tired excuse, but it is usually enough to satisfy human curiosity.

_Usually._ Ingrid clearly knows better, judging by her look of utter disbelief. Yes, he _very_ much regrets telling her the truth.

“I—Saldas, I’ve met dunmer in their _fifties_ that look older than you. Can I—” There is a note of caution in her voice, and she is visibly pulling back the reins on her curiosity. She knows she is toeing the line. “Can I ask how old you are?”

“Prefer not,” he says flatly, trying to ignore the cold dread that coils in his gut. It spreads over his limbs like icewater, drawing lines of crackling numbness up his fingers. He does not know why his body tenses as if anticipating a blow, does not understand why he reacts so strongly at such an irrelevant question — he should be annoyed, yes, but not _afraid_. It is so paltry and insignificant on its own, but there’s a voice inside him that whispers _what if._

_What if._

It is a piece of a puzzle he does not want her to solve. She would not even know _how_ to hurt him with so little information, he tells himself, she could not possibly know _why_ he has the face of a mer two centuries too young—but if she knew the why and how, if she knew the significance, if she had the inclination, she could easily find out who he used to be—she has no duty or obligation to him, and there are so many who would want his head— _how much coin would buy her loyalty?_ —

**_Stop._ **

_Stop._

He forcibly unclenches his hands and lets out the breath he did not realize he had been holding. When warmth finally floods back into his skin and he manages to drag his eyes up from the ground, Ingrid is looking at him intently, as if she is suddenly beginning to see the cracks.

She sharply averts her eyes.

“I—sorry, that wasn’t fair of me,” she mumbles, quietly enough that he suspects she knows how pity turns his stomach.

Reflexively, he almost tells her to mind her own business from now on — but he restrains himself before he lashes out. He forces down a breath. “Check that,” he says instead, motioning to the pot over the fire.

“Ah, shit, I forgot,” she cringes, and jumps up to lift the lid, mercifully not meeting his eyes.

The tension in the air abruptly dissipates, though he still feels the prickling memory of ice lingering on his skin. While she stirs in the leeks and a cupful of dried saltrice, he presses his fingertips into the bridge of his nose and purpled eyelids until his ears stop ringing.

_Stupid_.

They eat in silence, accompanied only by the sound of the storm outside and wind howling through the broken windows of the fort.

Being here reminds him too much of that feeling, that _bleakness_ he had the last time he walked through the streets of Balmora, mere months after the Red Year. Hlaalu architecture was never meant to withstand that sort of eruption. If not for the footbridges and the chunks of rubble choking the river, it would have been as if the entire city was never even there.

He remembers stumbling into the remains of the house he once lived in, now nothing more than a foundation and a calf-high square of stone marking where the walls once stood. Two years, he had shared that room — two years still seemed like such a long time, back then — and he could still see, in his mind’s eye, the cluttered shelves on the walls, the tattered bedspread, the lantern and skooma pipe on the table.

He had only been to Fort Frostmoth once before the disaster, but he can still see images of its former glory superimposed over the rubble, and he aches at the memory of what was lost.

To think he is older than these ruins — that is what people call Fort Frostmoth these days, _ruins_ , as if they are as ancient a fixture as the forest surrounding them — older than the generals fighting their fathers’ wars in the Legion, whose grandfathers easily could have been the young recruits he once met in this very building. And yet, he sees the crumpled building around him and feels dislocated from time. Like none of this is real, like he can still catch a boat to Khuul and a ferry to Gnaar Mok and go _home_.

He supposes he is permitted to think childish thoughts on occasion. To dream of the draping trees surrounding his little house on the dock, of reading by candlelight to the sound of softly creaking boards and the sea lapping against the rocks.

He holds no illusions. He knows there is nothing left to return to. He watched those trees burn, sitting on the deck of a refugee ship in the Inner Sea.

Though he did not see Solstheim again until many years after the disaster, the shock of stepping into something both familiar and alien still clings to him. He has, at least, moved past the point of tears.

He can feel Ingrid watching him, but he does not feel scrutinized. She is simply watching, and he lets her. When they have eaten their fill, he goes down to the docks to wash their cooking pot and bowls.

When he returns, she is already asleep. Her hand is still wrapped loosely around the hilt of her axe, and he does not quite fancy the idea of getting his head lopped off.

He knocks a wooden bowl against the door frame, and she flinches awake, predictably raising her weapon as if to fight. When recognition finally returns to her and she sees his faint smirk of amusement, she heaves a sigh and slumps back onto the bookshelf-bed with a hollow thud.

“Now that you’ve got that out of your system,” he teases, leaving the bowls on a table to dry and pulling his cloak over his head.

“Why d’you do that?” she asks, voice slurred with exhaustion.

“Do what, wake you?”

She makes a vague gesture with her arms. They look to be too heavy to convey meaning, and she lets them drop with a wrinkling of her nose. “Y’don’t lift your left arm past your shoulder.”

The observation gives him pause. What an odd thing to notice. He looks down at his shoulder, as if he can see the scars through his tunic, and manages a simple, “Yeah.”

He shakes the dust and ash from his cloak and folds it neatly. Ingrid says no more until he takes a seat on the opposite side of the makeshift bed, and he hears a muffled _sorry_ behind him.

“It’s okay,” he sighs. “Go back to sleep.”

 

He dreams of burning trees. He wakes once in a cold sweat, still feeling the sting of fire on his skin. He forces himself to roll off his bad shoulder, nursing the aching ligaments until the joint stops throbbing.

The nightmare keeps pressing at the edges of his mind whenever he closes his eyes, but whatever it is — memories, Vaermina, that mug of mazte he downed before bed — it eventually grows tired of his persistence and allows him an hour of peace before the dawn.

 

In the morning, Saldas finds a wrapped bundle of salted fish on top of his pack and a sleeping khajiit near the still-burning fire.

Ingrid nearly drops her pack when she finally sees her, and she looks to him for direction, pointing to her axe — he mouths _she’s a friend,_ and that seems to be enough for her.

He leaves three healing potions and a small roll of muslin by the khajiiti woman’s curled hands, and they leave quietly to avoid waking her.

Once they have made it back out onto the coast, Ingrid starts asking him about their changing surroundings — why the trees here lean to the north, or why he veers wide when there are smoldering logs nearby — and he is always grateful for an opportunity to speak on something he is knowledgeable about.

When he apologizes for his lengthy speeches, she only laughs. He briefly wonders if she realizes how rare it is for him to manage more than one or two sentences at a time, but the sound of her forgiving laughter is enough to tell him that she probably understands. They do not speak of last night, and the silence is comfortable as the sun crests over the horizon.

Echoing over the flats, he hears the first somber wail of a silt strider.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: anxiety attack

6.

_“Go away before I think of a creative use for your corpse.”_

Ingrid peeks around his shoulder. “What did he say?”

“He said come right in,” Saldas lies, nudging the door open — unlocked, as always — and shouts up the shaft of the tower, “It’s me, you old fetcher.”

Neloth groans in a dramatic display of annoyance. “There is only one fool on this island with the nerve to speak to me that way, and he’d _better not_ be inside my tower.”

“That’s me,” he says with false mirth, and Ingrid laughs behind him. “Coming up.”

The air is stifling in the upper floor, stale and laced through with questionable scents — he is quite certain he smells burnt flesh beneath the aroma of spiced canis root tea and dried herbs — and Neloth is glowering petulantly over his desk, a ball of Candlelight bobbing at his shoulder.

He pulls Neloth aside before he beckons Ingrid up. The old codger scoffs at the contact, but allows it until they have tucked into an alcove out of earshot, at which he swipes Saldas’ hand off his arm.

“That’s quite sufficient,” he scowls, plucking at his robes with a look of distaste. _“What's this all about? Who’s the girl?”_

_“She's my employer. And I wouldn't have brought her here if it wasn't important. I'll let her explain why we’re here, but I need you to do me a favour and be discreet.”_

Neloth purses his lips, looking very put-upon. _“Make your point.”_

_“She doesn’t know who I am. Keep it that way.”_

He raises a pointed brow. _“That’s it?”_

Saldas narrows his eyes at him, mildly appalled at his complete disregard. _“Yes.”_

Neloth barks a bitter laugh. _“Oh, what is it? You're worried she'll find out that you were a hero once? Yes, I'm sure she'd be very disappointed.”_

The words hit like a kick to the gut — he knows, he _knows_ Neloth did not mean it the way his mind has misconstrued it, but the **_once_ ** in that statement settles in his chest like a stone. Neloth shoulders past him, barking an order at his fidgeting steward. Saldas takes a moment to retrieve his jaw from the floor and swallow his bleeding pride before calling Ingrid up.

 

Clouds still hang heavy in the sky when he withdraws from the tower. It is nearing mid-afternoon, he thinks — the sun is a pale daub of white burning through the cloud cover high in the western sky. They have been conversing for the greater part of the day, and his headache has persisted for much of it. They at least have a destination now, a temple to the north that he can reliably locate, so the visit was not a wasted trip.

Ingrid had been the first to retreat, probably half an hour ago, when the conversation turned to the more explicit details of Neloth's experiments. As he approaches the silt strider dock down the hill, he finds her talking with Dusty’s handler, huddled near the fire.

She sees him approach, eyes flicking up to regard him as he nears the platform. There are words in her rigid posture, and in the strange steadiness of her gaze, but he does not know her well enough to read them. She excuses herself with a polite bow to the handler — he can never quite remember the old mer’s name, _Revyn? Renys?_ — and closes the distance, meeting him halfway.

He falls into step beside her and they walk along the edge of the cliffs.

“I was wondering when you’d come down,” she says, breaking the pensive silence, “He never does tire of talking about himself, does he?”

He smirks. “I don’t think so, no.”

“No kidding. I thought I’d see the fifth era before he was finished.”

“Hope he didn’t try to talk you into any favours. Those rarely go as planned.”

“No, thank the gods,” she laughs, shivering in the wind.

They choose an outcropping of rock west of the towers, and sit with their legs dangling off the edge. There is still an early spring chill in the air, but Red Mountain is calm in the distance. The air is clear, and visibility is high. He can see the peak of the mountain from here, and even the line where half of the crater shattered during the eruption, a rain of smoldering earth arcing out like trebuchet fire and pelting the coast with a sound like the cracking of distant thunder, great arches of smoke streaking the sky—

He shudders, and pulls his scarf tighter around the back of his neck. That is a line of thought he would rather not revisit.

“I’m sorry for last night,” Ingrid says suddenly, quietly enough that it is almost lost in the wind.

He had not expected an apology from her. He turns to look at her, the way she sometimes watches him when she believes he is not paying attention. She does not acknowledge it, but she knows he is watching.

“For what?” he asks, though he knows the answer. A small, petty part of him just wants to hear it.

She chews her lip, squinting against the wind. “Prying.”

He considers her apology for a moment, eyes tracing the line of Vvardenfell’s shore on the horizon. “I’m not angry with you,” he says at length, and it is not a lie.

“You have every right to be. I was the one who asked for discretion in the first place, and yet I’m the one who keeps violating your privacy.”

He _had_ been annoyed at first, obviously, but there is a vast difference between intrusiveness and innocent curiosity. What sort of person would hold a grudge for something as objectively trivial as asking his age?

He is almost insulted, before he remembers that _she does not know him,_ and as far as she is concerned, he might very well be that sort of person. He can imagine how it must have seemed, from her perspective. Coiling up at such a seemingly harmless question, surely looking ready to snap. He is well aware that he’s a giant of a dunmer, that his appearance doesn't exactly inspire feelings of security. He has always been intimidating, even before there was any actual justification for it.

And he remembers the way Ingrid had flinched away from him when they had first met. He has never forgotten the naked fear on her face at that moment, the half-step she took toward the door. How much does she fear him now?

He sighs, suddenly feeling very foolish. “Technically, you’ve asked me plenty of questions. You had no way of knowing that one had teeth.”

Ingrid gives him an odd look, at that.

“Sorry, that probably doesn’t translate well—”

“No, I— it’s a figure of speech, I know.” She looks conflicted for a moment, and then almost embarrassed. “My mother in law used it a couple of times. Haven’t ever heard it from anyone but her, is all.”

“You’re married?” he blurts before he can stop himself, and flinches internally when he realizes he’s said it aloud.

“I was,” she says before he can apologize.

The look on her face cuts him to the bone. It is only there for a split second, but he recognizes it. It’s old pain. Bittersweet.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he manages, for want of stronger words.

To his surprise and subsequent relief, Ingrid simply gives a breathy laugh, casting him an inquisitive glance. “How d’you figure he’s dead?”

He blanches a little. “I— isn’t he?”

“Yes,” she admits, with a level of detachment he envies. “I was just curious as to how you came to that conclusion.”

He is silent for a moment, unsure if he can even gather the words. It is a lot to reveal. But somehow, he feels that he owes her this.

“When you grow accustomed to a certain kind of pain, you begin to recognize it in others.”

A bit of her facade falls. “You too?”

“Yeah. Me too.”

She nods, slowly. She turns her gaze out to the horizon. “Does it ever get easier?”

He wants to comfort her. He wants to tell her all wounds heal with time. But he still wakes some nights with the feeling of another’s breath on his skin, another heartbeat thrumming against his bare chest — he wakes reaching for warmth that has been gone for two hundred years, and every time, he crumbles, muffling his ugly sobs in the pillow until there is nothing left inside of him. He can still hear his voice, if he really tries. But his face... the face he used to know like the back of his own hand is nothing more than a grainy smudge of grey in his mind's eye.

Those nights are few and far between, in recent years. It has been many merciful months since the last time it was that bad, and another many months before that. But his eyes and throat and chest still _burn_ at the memory, and he knows the wound still bleeds.

Perhaps, for her, it will get easier. Maybe it will for him, as well.

He lets out a shaking sigh. “I sure hope so.”

And she does not respond, but she _knows._

They watch Dusty graze placidly in the shallows for a while, chirping softly and picking water-weeds with her forelegs. There are words in the creases of Ingrid’s brow, and in her rigid shoulders. “Something else is troubling you,” he observes, and pretends he doesn’t see the way she tenses.

“Yes.”

“Is it something you wish to talk about?”

“No,” she gently declines, though her eyes disagree.

He gives her a pause of a reasonable length, in case she changes her mind, but she does not continue. He nods. “Very well.”

When the sun finally begins to dip below the horizon, they return to the tower in silence.

 

He dreams of wooden chimes, swinging in a warm southern wind. There is a storm brewing overhead — he can see no further than the edge of the camp, and the wind howls and whistles through tall knots of trama root like the sound of circling wolves.

He stands in a sheltered pocket between tents, hands wrapped around the straps of his pack, so heavy-laden with books that he can feel the hide stretching. He can feel the fibers of the woven mat under his bare feet, the wind whipping his hair. His muscles ache, but it is the ache of constant use, and he feels light. He feels young. And when he wakes, he finds it very difficult not to cry.

 

There is an ash storm forming on the southern horizon when they leave in the morning. They had opted to use the steward's quarters rather than try to convince Neloth to let them sleep in the main tower; “Oh, no, I’ve heard about his experiments. I don't want him to get _inspired_ while I'm sleeping,” Ingrid had said, only half joking, and the steward gave them both a weary, knowing look before generously offering his quarters.

Ingrid had kept her conversations with Neloth largely private. It seemed she still wanted to keep Saldas as uninvolved as possible, despite his explicitly voiced desire to _be_ involved. At least it didn’t seem to be a matter of distrust anymore — her hesitance was less indicative of apprehension than it was of worry, if her frequent troubled glances were anything to go by. He could feel her dancing around the order, the _stay here while I go and get myself killed_ that he would have to blatantly refuse.

She does, finally, ask him before they descend the stairs, “Would you stay behind if I asked?”

“No,” he says, truthfully.

She nods, closing the door behind her. “Didn’t think so.”

When Neloth described this Temple of Miraak, he was immediately reminded of the crumbling ruin in the center of the island. He had stumbled upon it once, many years ago, and pointedly avoided it from then on. He is no mage, his motley collection of memorized spells notwithstanding, but he’s no fool. He is sensitive enough to the hum of magic throughout Nirn to know the ruin was pulsing with a powerful malicious energy, and he is smart enough to stay far away from it.

Unfortunately, in spite of his better judgement and sense of self-preservation, moral duty calls.

He takes them northwest across the shallowest and most narrow point of the river, and then straight north through the woodland. The storm still looms at their back, carried on a warm and humid wind, but the air is still clear, and he is almost certain they will be far enough north to not feel the storm when it blows in.

_Almost_ turns out to be the operative word.

The storm arrives two hours before he had predicted, and it is _vicious._ They cannot set up camp in these winds — it would tear their tent apart, and that is _if_ they managed to get the hides tied to a frame without being carried away like chaff on the wind. They are bundled up as tightly as they can manage to keep the ash out, but even Saldas is beginning to get dust inside his goggles, and his gear is not secondhand, unlike Ingrid’s.

There is a dwemer ruin to the northeast, sunken deep into the earth; Saldas knows his limitations, and he _does not_ do well underground, but it is their only reliable option. When Ingrid shouts over the roaring wind, _what do we do?_ he grabs her by the hand and leads her blind through the swirling ash.

The air is so thick with ash that he cannot see farther than several feet in front of them, and he cannot navigate by the mountains — but the trees are bowing forward in the gale, so he knows which way is north, and that is all he needs. He walks until he can hear the wind buffeting loose hide, and his feet hit flat stone beneath the shifting layer of silt. The remains of a buckskin tent are flapping violently in the wind, trapped beneath fire pit stones and blocks of metal. He feels carefully for the stairs, Ingrid gripping tight to his arm as they descend.

At the bottom of the stairs, she practically launches herself onto the lever, throwing it forward as soon as they’ve set foot on the platform. They both collapse in relief as the gears lurch and begin to lower them to safety.

Part of him — the rational part of him — is relieved. A less rational part of him wastes no time in ripping all of the warmth from his skin, as fast as the darkness swallows the sunlight above them. He is lucky he is still on his back, or he is certain he would not have been able to keep his footing.

Some of the ash follows them down, settling like first snow on the stone. He can hear the sharp, tinny sound of Ingrid striking a flintstone, barely audible above the low groaning of dwemer machinery. He focuses on the rhythmic sound rather than the tingling of his hands, until he hears the faint crackling of flame. The gears grind to a reluctant stop.

There is a warm hand on his arm. “You alright?”

He nods tightly, and forces himself to get up, rolling off of his pack.

The anteroom is dead silent, and pitch dark save for Ingrid’s torch. He unwraps his scarves and peels the goggles off his eyes, wrinkling his nose at the layer of dust on the inside the lenses. He wipes the ash from his face with the cleanest length of scarf he can find, and lets it fall.

Ingrid mills about the room, searching the shelves that line the walls — she is familiar with dwemer ruins, he realizes, moving around with a confidence that only comes with experience. She pops the lid off of a flat earthenware bottle, pours its contents into one of the hanging burners, and lights it with her torch.

His hands are shaking as he removes his pack and cloak, fumbling clumsily at the fastenings of his armor. The room is not small, but he knows how many fathoms of dirt are above their heads — he cannot convince his hands to stop shaking, and he cannot reason his heart into a temperate rhythm, and he hates _hates_ dwemer ruins with every fiber of his being, and Ingrid has noticed that he has not left the edge of the platform.

She is at his side before he’s realized that she had even moved, grasping his hands to cease their futile attempt at removing his cuirass. “Saldas, sit down,” she orders, and he obeys, but he has enough presence of mind to note the tremor in her voice.

She unfastens the buckles herself, and lifts the breastplate — up and over from the right, the way he has always done it to avoid strain on his bad shoulder — but when she reaches to loosen the hide gambeson, he stills her hands. “I'm okay,” he lies, burying his face in his hands.

“We can go back up,” she suggests.

He shakes his head, grinding the heels of his palms into his eyes to keep them from watering. “No, that would be suicide,” he says, miserably, “I'm sorry—”

“Saldas, talk to me.”

“I don't do well underground, I never have. I thought— I thought the obvious necessity would make it easier this time but I—”

She pulls his hands away, and presses his off-hand to her breastplate. “Saldas, breathe.”

He doesn't understand at first, until he feels the even rise and fall of her chest, and has enough sense to try to match his breathing to hers. He rests his forehead on his knees and focuses on just this, tries to forget where he is just long enough to make his heart stop racing. He thinks of trees draped with hanging moss, the sound of the sea lapping against the rocks. Tries to remember the feeling of the cool water on his ankles.

Ingrid is dragging her fingertips rhythmically up and down his back, and he realizes now how close she is, with her thigh pressed to his hip and her shoulder against his temple. Normally, closeness would have only worsened this — but Ingrid is calm, and the subtle movement of her fingers on his back is slowly drawing the ice out of his veins.

_You’re okay,_ she whispers. _You’re okay._

He forces himself to focus on her voice until he believes her.

“I’m sorry,” he croaks, once he has regained enough of his composure to be embarrassed about the situation.

Ingrid stops, pushes gently at his shoulders to make him sit up, and takes him by the chin, forcing him to look her in the eyes. Her expression is caught somewhere between concern and outrage, and he withers before it. “Do _not_ apologize to me,” she orders, firmly. “Not for this.”

He closes his eyes, draws a shaking breath, and forces himself to give a shallow nod. She releases him, smoothing her thumb over the place she had grabbed him. She asks if he needs anything, and he shakes his head, experimentally flexing his fingers — he can feel them again, at least, so he busies himself at removing the rest of his armor while Ingrid wanders off to dig through her pack.

They eat their dried provisions — cured horker and smoked salmon brought in from Windhelm — and pass a mug of cold mazte back and forth until they’ve both calmed their nerves. Neither has the energy to hold a conversation, and Saldas is still numb to his very core.

They spread out their bedrolls next to a hanging burner, pack their belongings in preparation for the morning, and sleep.


	7. Chapter 7

7.

When he wakes, the flames in their burners are flickering low, casting the room in half-shadow. It was a night of dreamless sleep, and his mind is still in a fog — it registers that it is quieter than it should be, and he reaches to wake Ingrid, only to bury his hand in a cold and empty heap of furs.

This alone does not alarm him. She could have simply wandered further into the ruin, or gone aboveground to relieve herself. He sets about rolling and tying their bedrolls in the half-dark, lashing them both to his pack so they will be ready to set out whenever Ingrid returns, and he waits.

And waits.

It is still far too quiet, and it makes his skin crawl — he paces back and forth to burn the nervous energy, determined to keep his mind occupied until they leave this wretched place.

His foot catches on something, sending it clattering to the ground, and he nearly jumps out of his skin. “Ah, shit,” he hisses, tisking quietly at himself as he reaches to pick it up.

He stops short, fingers stilled on the leather-wrapped handle.

It’s Ingrid’s axe. She must have had it propped against the shelves, where she had left her armor the night before. The armor is gone, but her bearskins still lay neatly folded atop her pack.

He does not know her very well, but he knows she is not a woman who would wander about unarmed. He does not wait to see if she will return — he slings her pack atop his own, and pulls the lever to summon the platform.

 

There is not a breath of wind in the valley when he ascends. It is eerily silent, the morning sunlight muted with thick clouds, and the ash that covers the ground is as even and pristine as sifted flour. It is at once serene and stagnant, and he is not sure if it is his own panic closing like hands around his throat, or the fine film of dust hanging suspended in the air.

There are tracks — Azura be praised, there are _tracks,_ and there is no wind to disturb them — but he recognizes the short strides and dragging gait in the way the footprints trail sluggishly through the ash, and his heart twists with realization.

He should have known, when he realized her axe had been left behind. There were only so many conclusions to draw.

He follows the tracks northeast, and prays she will still be alive when he finds her.

 

He _feels_ the temple long before it begins to emerge from the distant mist, a faint and low vibration like the ground is pulsating beneath his feet. He keeps Azura’s invocation on his tongue, thumbing the sharp edges of the pendant at his neck until his fingers are sore.

There is a sweeping breeze where the forest gives way to the clearing. Ingrid’s footsteps are wiped away, disappearing into the wet drifts of dirty snow and ash that shift around the temple’s base. Ancient bones litter the temple grounds, cracked and sun-bleached and half-obscured by earth. He does not remember seeing so many, the last time he dared to venture this close. There are whole skeletons now, still bound by decaying ligaments — most belong to men or mer, but there are some he does not recognize, thigh-bones nearly his height and girth, ribcages large enough to stable a small horse.

No, he does recognize them. But he does not want to think of what kind of power it would take to kill _dragons._ He has heard rumors in recent years of dragons in Skyrim, and whispers of one such beast lurking in the mountains to the north, but this... this is excessive. He can count two, four, six... _seven_ skeletons, just within his field of vision, and he is almost certain there are more over the crest of the mountain. Where had they even come from? _Why_ had they come?

The hum of energy slowly intensifies the closer he gets to the temple, to the point that it is almost a physical pressure. It feels _raw_ here, like the fabric of Mundus is so thin that he could plunge his fingers into the dirt and feel the fringe of Oblivion itself.

At the very base of the stairs, he is greeted by the great yawning maw of a dragon’s skull, shreds of skin still clinging to the base of its curled horns. Its neck is twisted as if broken, spiderlike wing-bones crumpled beneath its narrow ribcage like a handful of dry straw. But something in it still feels _alive._ Like it will crawl up from the ground and devour him whole.

His feet will not move. He feels like he is suffocating, clutching his pendant so hard that the points break skin. This is madness. There is no way she is alive, if she has actually made it inside the temple. This... _thing_ kills _dragons,_ and as cruel as the years have been to him, as often as he has contemplated his own mortality, he very much does _not_ want to die.

He almost turns around. He knows he will be ashamed of it later, and even then, he very nearly walks away from the whole situation before he gets in too deep.

But he feels eyes on his back — not the dead dragon before him, empty sockets staring sightlessly forward, but something familiar, almost motherly.

_You were a hero, once._

In the distance, there is a shout — it is a woman’s voice, high and reedy and desperate, but the words are lost in the wind. It is not likely to be Ingrid’s voice, but the possibility is just enough to send him running up the stairs.

There is so much _more_ of the temple than he remembers. It could just be the years distorting his memory, but there is just _too much_ of it to have been built so quickly. Perhaps it was always here, buried and forgotten beneath the earth. The entire thing had to have been dug out of the hillside, like a marble figure slowly chiseled free from the stone that binds it. There are arches in varying states of construction, which is new, as are the wooden scaffolds built hastily around their bases. The enthralled workers, mostly in tattered netch-hides or cheap patchwork armor, completely ignore his presence. He continues unhindered up the stairs.

There is that voice again — yes, he is certain he heard it this time, a woman crying out above the wind, and he scrambles up the rest of the stairs as quickly as his shaking legs will let him.

He is immediately taken aback by how small the temple feels from above, compared to how it had felt at the foot of the stairs — it is nothing more than a shallow amphitheater, and a great stone dome with a glowing pillar set in the center. The dome is intricately and precariously carved — the design reminds him of veins laid bare under a knife, spidery and organic — and that feeling of rawness persists, an open wound on the mountainside. He knows the temple itself is likely buried deep in the mountain, festering quietly beneath the surface.

He scans the vacant faces of Miraak’s thralls, until one of them looks back.

It is a nordic woman — not Ingrid, to his dismay, but so similar in build that he had almost been fooled. She is relatively young and built like a plow-horse, clothed in furs and burnished steel, pale hair plastered to her dirty face. Her hands are wrapped around another woman’s shoulders, frozen where she had been trying to shake her out of the trance.

She shouts something at him, but it is in a dialect he does not understand — he knows a few words of the nordic language, and the cadence of her speech is similar, but the words themselves are too far removed from the parent tongue to be of any use to him. She must be one of the Skaal villagers, having followed her kinsmen to the temple. Indeed, many of the thralls on this side of the temple are pale of hair with round, ruddy cheeks. The Skaal village is a day’s travel northeast, if his memory serves him. She is a long way from home.

“You there — have you seen a nord woman, about _this_ tall?” he asks, but the woman stares blankly in response. “Alright, no Cyrodilic, apparently. Do you, um... _do you speak Dunmeris, maybe?”_

She narrows her eyes, as if squinting will make her ears function better.

“Suppose not, then,” he mumbles bitterly.

He turns away to look for Ingrid himself, and is immediately greeted with the sight of a cracked elven cuirass halfway across the courtyard. Her back is facing him, but that is _definitely_ her, and praise Azura’s merciful name, she is _alive._

Her leather bracer is hanging off her forearm, only half-fastened. She must have already been awake when Miraak’s influence took hold — he recalls what sort of power it took for Voryn Dagoth to do the same, to grab hold of people from the safety of his citadel, asleep or awake, and twist them to his will. _They_ all went mad. Irrevocably so.

He shrugs their packs off his shoulders. Ingrid is chiselling blindly at a pillar, and he pulls the mallet and chisel from her hands, placing himself in front of her.

“Ingrid, wake up,” he urges, hoping the control is weaker for having taken her while she was awake — but she does not respond, stiffly trying to reach for the tools again, and he is forced to hold her wrists in one hand while he grudgingly reaches for the shiv in his boot. He is vaguely aware of the Skaal girl hovering in his peripheral vision, but she keeps her distance, nervously observing.

He mumbles an apology, pushes up the sleeve of her gambeson where her bracer is hanging loose, and nicks her forearm with the point of the blade.

She wrenches her arm back, staggering backward before he can grab her — she stumbles, but he catches her under her arms before her knees give out underneath her.

He goes down with her, still too unsteady to support her full weight, but she is not quite lucid yet, still fighting Miraak’s hold — she thrashes for a moment, trying to get away, and he loosens his grip so she can put a little space between them. When recognition hits, it hits hard — she freezes at an arm’s length, hyperventilating and violently shivering, blinking owlishly at her surroundings.

“Ingrid,” he whispers, taking her face in his hands. Her cheeks are so cold that he can feel it through his leather gloves, and it takes her a moment to focus on his face. “You still with me?”

She nods stiffly. He unties her cloak from where he had fastened it around his neck and lays it across her shoulders, pulling it closed in the front to shelter her from the wind. He does not know how long she has been out here, exposed to the elements. She is lucky it is another mild morning of not-quite-spring — nevertheless, he takes her hands and checks them for frostbite, pulling his own gloves off to warm her fingers between his palms.

“I’ll kill him,” she says, voice hollow if not for the subtle tremor. He sees the flame in her eyes and realizes she is shaking more from rage than the frigid air.

“You need to rest,” he asserts, but she shakes her head, pulling her hands free and fumbling with the loose ties on her bracer. He tries to still her hands, but she pulls away, jerky and uncoordinated. “Ingrid, you can’t go in there like this.”

“What would you have me do, then? _Wait?_ Make myself vulnerable to him again?”

“If he can take you when you’re awake, it won’t make much of a difference. You’ve barely slept in three days, don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

She scoffs, clearly attempting to mask her disquiet with anger. “Very comforting.”

“I’m not here to comfort you,” he snaps, “I’m here to keep you _alive._ You need to have your damned head on straight in a fight, and you can’t do that right now, you can’t just—”

There is a voice at his right. He had forgotten the Skaal girl was still standing there — she is asking a question, but he does not understand her. Ingrid stares for a moment, and says something in the nordic tongue, something that sounds like _who are you?_

 _Frea,_ she says, and, realizing Ingrid only partially understands the language, begins to speak in simpler words, punctuated with gestures. The word _Miraak_ is used. This girl is well-informed, it seems. He is not sure if that is a good thing.

“What is she saying?” he asks warily.

Ingrid is as still as a stone, watching and calculating as the girl speaks. “She’s saying she also has cause to fight Miraak. That her people cannot be helped until he is destroyed.”

The girl speaks again — to him, this time, even though she must know by now that he does not understand. Ingrid nods, using one of the deep grooves in the pillar to pull herself to her feet.

He stands, ready to catch her if she falls, but her balance is holding. “What are you doing?”

She does not answer at first, tying her bracer with her free hand, pulling the knot tight with her teeth. “She says she’ll keep an eye on me.”

“You’re— you’re _leaving me behind?_ ” he hisses, absolutely livid. “Are you out of your fucking mind? You’ve known her for all of thirty seconds, and you trust her with your life? Are you _sure_ about that, Ingrid?”

She does not meet his eyes, but she takes his ire without flinching. “Saldas...”

“—and I swear to you, if you pull that ‘it’s a nord thing, you wouldn’t understand’ guarshit I’ll—”

“Can you please just... trust my judgement? Just this once?”

“Not right now, no. For obvious enough reasons, I’d think.”

She grits her teeth, a little flicker of muscle in her jaw. The Skaal girl — Frea, she had said — fidgets guiltily, but does not retract her offer. He does not trust her, not when she is so eagerly enabling this sort of senseless suicidal vendetta. But Ingrid is determined — she is still shaking almost imperceptibly with rage, but she is stable on her feet, and she at least seems to have the presence of mind to feel guilty about this.

He cannot stop her. He also cannot, in good conscience, allow her to walk unobstructed into the jaws of Oblivion.

Behind him, he hears the distinctive crackling of a spell being cast, and reflexively grabs Ingrid, ducking behind the nearby pillar — a ball of fire bursts against the stone, and though most of it is blocked by the pillar, flecks of liquid fire burn pinholes in his netch-hide gambeson. It stings his skin, but burns up before it can cause any real damage.

“Saldas, my axe!”

He pulls the handle from his belt and presses it into her hand. She is not in any condition to fight, but she should at least be armed.

“How many are there?”

He glances around the corner. There is one in the half-cover of a sunken ramp, and another walking toward them with his dagger drawn — he dodges another ball of fire, and the spray hits him in the shoulder.

“Ugh, fuck,” he hisses, patting out the flames before they burn through. “Just two, I think. One’s coming our way. I can get him if he gets too close, but the other one is going to be a problem.”

She glances toward their packs. “Cover me. I need my shield.”

 _Cover me, she says._ He gathers a ball of fire in his hand, steps out from behind the pillar, and lobs it directly into the ramp. It hits the upper edge just as the masked attacker ducks down, and he hears a muffled scream as the molten liquid spills over the edge.

Ingrid scrambles to the packs behind him, and he advances while she drags them to cover. The man pacing toward him strikes out with his dagger, a clumsy dwemer thing, and he dodges the slash, grabbing him by the wrist and pulling him forward. He lands on his face, and before he can scramble to get up, Saldas draws his sword and buries it in his back.

A ball of fire sails past his head, hitting a pillar somewhere behind him. The man in the sunken ramp has stumbled out of cover, most of the fabric on his neck and shoulder burned away, revealing the pink, charred flesh beneath. He cradles his arm to his chest, but limps forward, babbling in Dunmeris — _“You will die for the glory of Miraak.”_ — and fills his palm with fire.

But before the spell has charged, Ingrid appears from seemingly nowhere, landing a vicious kick to the cultist’s knee that sends him sprawling and shrieking onto the ground.

He throws the half-readied Firebolt toward her, but it falls apart as it travels, trailing through the air like water thrown from a cup. The bulk of it hits square in the center of Ingrid’s shield, angled downward so it splashes onto his thigh — and he squeals, but only until Ingrid buries her axe in his bone-yellow mask with a sickly wet crunch.

They stand in silence for a moment, rigid and hyper-aware. Ingrid sways, but only slightly, and arcane flame ripples on her shield, leaving a coat of black soot as it burns up. Saldas hears a dripping sound, and spins to face it, sword ready — but it is only the Skaal girl, wrenching her bloody axe from the corpse of another cultist.

Shrugging at his blank stare, she wipes the blade on the man’s trousers, and holsters her weapon. He turns back to Ingrid, who is doing the same with a handful of charred robes.

She gives Frea a commanding glance, and the girl nods dutifully.

_She’s going to get herself killed._

When Ingrid comes close enough, he catches her gently by the arm.

“There’s no talking you out of this, is there?”

Ingrid regards him for a long moment, and reaches into the neck of her breastplate, fishing out a long braided cord. She grabs him by the wrist and places a warm pendant in his palm, a double-headed axe cast in bronze.

“I’ll be back for this.”

He takes her hand before she can walk away, approaching desperation. “Ingrid, please. This is suicide.”

She offers a wry smile. “Not if I take him with me.”

She is mad. Either this has been a suicide mission from the start, or he is a horrible person for allowing her to walk away —  he knows she will die if she walks in there, and he will have been the only thing standing between her and the door.

She closes his hand around the pendant. “Wait for me.”

It is as much an order as it is a question. He knows it is not solely a test of his loyalty, but that is, fundamentally, what she is asking. She is asking too much of him. He should be insulted. He should refuse. He should put that pendant back in her hand, walk right back to Raven Rock and — _and what? continue living that miserable life you’ve built for yourself? keep being a useless sack of shit, hiding in self-imposed confinement because you can’t face what you’ve become?_

He bites his tongue on his refusal, settling for: “How long?”

“Two days,” she says, adjusting the straps of her pack. “Three, at most. That's all I ask.”

He nods, regrettably. “I’ll wait at the edge of the woods, but no closer. I’m sure there’s more where they came from.”

She nods. “Stay safe.”

“You too.”

He watches them descend into the temple, left alone with three cooling bodies and the gnawing, accusatory awareness that he will come to regret this later.


	8. Chapter 8

8.

 _Wait for me, she says._ Damn it, he should have just said _no_ and left it at that — let her come to him if she really makes it out alive. He has better things to do than pace ‘round the courtyard in case the pair of them grow some common sense and come crawling back out while their heads are still attached.

He drags the bodies to the edge of the amphitheater and savagely kicks them over, purely to satisfy his spiteful mood. Ash take them, the damned fools.

She said wait, so he waits. However bitterly and pacingly and out-loud-rantingly he does it, he waits.

The first night, he does not sleep. He holds vigil at the center of the courtyard, the stone at his back casting pale green over his shoulders. Even if he cannot see someone approach, for lack of eyes in the back of his head, the acoustics of the amphitheater are such that he could probably hear a scrib taking a piss from a hundred meters away. It is bitingly cold, but he does not light a fire — he bundles up in his cloak, far insufficient to keep back the chill, and lets the shivering be an excuse for his shaking hands.

_Two days. Three at most. That’s all I ask._

Several hours pass, and he still cannot decide if his anger is justified. He is not angry with her for disregarding his advice — not truly angry, although he would be lying if he said he wasn’t at least annoyed — he is just... _outraged_ at her disregard for her own life. She is, by every indication, a brilliant woman. She is superbly level-headed and perceptive, so far as he has seen. Observant enough to notice a trap, surely. And it was _so obviously_ a trap.

He only hopes that Skaal girl was what she seemed, and that a nord’s word is as valuable as they seem to think. He prays that she did not leave him behind for the same reasons she asked him to stay in Tel Mithryn. If that is the case, well... he already has trouble sleeping at night.

 

He climbs the stairs at dawn and looks out at Red Mountain in the distance, pouring forth great plumes of ash. There is no southerly wind to push the ash toward the coast, so it rises steadily upward, a writhing column of grey. He holds his hands out, comparing the colour — much the same, in the pink haze of dawn, though in more honest light he has always edged more toward blue — and wishes, not for the first time, that he had never left Vvardenfell.

He knows he cannot stay for much longer. He has been known to fall asleep on his feet, and he figures it’s only a matter of time before the cultists come looking for their comrades. He searches for the Steed, hanging low in the sky opposite the approaching sunrise, and waits — when Azura’s star blinks into view, pale and bright against the salmon-pink horizon, he mumbles a prayer under his breath, a simple plea for wisdom and patience, and gathers his pack.

 

The second day passes quickly. He makes a poultice for the punctures in his left palm and wraps it in muslin. The wounds had not even begun to sting until he returned to the valley and the chill left his hands, leaving his palm throbbing and over-warm. Though the punctures barely bled, he would not risk infection by leaving them untreated.

He sets up camp at the edge of the trees, knowing he is putting himself in full view of any attackers. This far out, he is not overly concerned for his own safety. In his youth, he spent many long months camping alone, and if he can handle a bull kagouti trampling his tent, he can handle pretty much anything. If Ingrid does return — _if_ — he wants her to be able to find him, at least.

He cannot stay awake for another night, as much as he had fully intended to. He closes his eyes for just a moment around midday, propped against a sturdy pine, and does not wake until dawn.

 

_Two days. Three at most. That’s all I ask._

He stares out at the temple through the morning fog. The fire has burned down to smoldering embers, and all is cast in grey and blue under the heavy clouds. He holds his hands up to the sky in the dim light, and finds that the arches and spires of the temple practically blend into his skin, cold and lifeless on the distant mountaintop.

If there was any anger left inside him, it is long gone now. He is forced to consider that his instinct had been correct — that Ingrid had left herself unprotected on his account, either for the sake of keeping him uninvolved, or to avoid putting him in danger. He isn’t sure which possibility is more unsettling.

He should have followed her inside. She could not have forced him to stay behind, she is as much his master as he is hers. He could have ended their verbal contract there, and went in of his own accord — she might have hated him for it, but at least there would be a greater likelihood that she would be alive enough to do so. Or maybe they both would have gotten killed. Hindsight is always clearer, as they say.

There is a northern breeze coming over the mountains, cool and dry and cleansing. It carries gentle flurries of snow into the forest, rustling the leaves like waves — he closes his eyes and lets the snowflakes land on his face, tiny pinpricks melting on his cheeks like sea spray in winter, imagining he's standing on an island in Sheogorad and watching the surf beat against the shore—

“I didn’t think you’d stay.”

He jolts awake, still propped against the trunk of the tree, and his hand instinctively goes to his weapon. The sky is only marginally brighter — he can’t have been sleeping for more than a few minutes — and Ingrid is sitting opposite him at the fire pit, stoking the flames as if she had never left.

He blinks, bleary-eyed and not totally sure this is not a dream. “What—?”

“With how angry you were when I left. I didn’t think you would stay.”

He sits up with a grunt, his back protesting stiffly at the movement. “Yes. Well. I _had_ considered it. But you know where I live, and I quite enjoy having my head above my shoulders.”

She gives him an odd look as he moves to sit by the fire. The corner of her mouth twitches with a suppressed smile, and she turns back to the fire with a shake of her head. There are fresh scabs on her face, and her knuckles are ringed with livid purple bruises. She looks beaten. Words lay idle in her distant eyes, but she seems content to leave them unspoken.

Cautiously, he sits beside her.

She is sitting on her folded bedroll, knees drawn up to her chest as she prods the logs in the fire with a thin branch. Tentatively, he takes her hand. She does not flinch away from the contact, but she gives him a questioning glance as he pours a diluted healing spell into her battered knuckles. He pretends he doesn’t see the way she is watching him.

“I’m okay,” she says softly, but it is not a rebuke. There is a tinge of guilt in her voice. He gives her a silencing glance.

She watches quietly as he rolls up her sleeve. The place he had nicked her forearm is red around the edges, puckered and tender, but it is not infected. He presses a healing spell into that, too, just to lessen the swelling.

Her eyes fall on the bandages around his palm. “What happened to your hand?”

 _I panicked and accidentally hurt myself_ doesn’t make him sound very stable, so he reaches into his breastplate to pull out his pendant — racer teeth lashed to a garnet with faded black twine, in the shape of a five-pointed star — and makes an attempt at a light tone. “I suppose I could have picked a better object of reassurance. Something with fewer sharp edges, maybe.”

Her face does not change, and it takes him a moment to realize that she is not angry — her expression is carefully restrained, but he still sees a faint flicker of... something. She turns her palm up, but leaves it lying in his bandaged hand. There is a little white half-moon in the crease of her palm, something he would have never noticed had she not pointed it out, and he thinks he understands.

Absently, he traces the scar with his thumb, and falls into a pensive silence.

The moment is too tender. Too intimate. He finds himself wondering, again, if this is just a dream.

“What did you find down there?” he asks, thumb pausing over the scar. He can feel her pulse thrumming faintly between the tendons.

She stiffens. “Nothing good.”

“Did you defeat him?”

“No.”

He watches her face. Carefully measured, still, but he knows her well enough to recognize disappointment. “You did see him, then.”

“Yes,” she bites out.

“But you came back alive,” he prompts, trying to draw the rest of the explanation out of her. He feels her bristle at the intrusion, patience quickly waning.

“I was too weak to fight him.” She is a hair’s breadth from snapping, and he hears the _shut up_ behind the words, curled like a viper in the underbrush.

He shakes his head, lips pressed in a hard line. “That doesn’t sound like you.”

The pulse quickens beneath his thumb. “What would you know about me?”

“Not a damned thing, evidently.”

She recoils at his frigid tone, looking at him as if she did not think him capable of such a thing, as if his deferential attitude was so ingrained into her perception of him that she had never considered she could provoke him.

“Where’s all that determination you had when you approached me in Windhelm?” he demands, that dormant anger and outrage rearing its ugly head once again. “—or when you spent two weeks emptying every ruin within ten miles of Raven Rock? You’re undisciplined and headstrong, but you’re definitely not weak. Your problem isn’t a lack of capability, it’s a lack of readiness. You need to know your enemy, and prepare accordingly. Especially if you must meet him in his own territory, on his own terms.”

“I _know_ that.”

“Oh, do you? So you really were trying to kill yourself, then?”

She fixes him with a glare that could peel paint.

“I think you knew you were in over your head back at Tel Mithryn. You knew, but you were too proud to take those two steps back.”

She stares daggers into him, gritting her teeth, _daring_ him to take it back. If he was not just as stubborn as she is, he would yield.

She is the first to look away. She withdraws her hand — he had not even realized he was still holding it, she was as still as a stone — and stands as if to leave. She stops after several steps, though, and clenches her fists as if she is physically restraining herself from storming off.

“With every other obstacle we’ve faced, you’ve found a way. If you can’t go over it, go around it. Stop being so afraid to take the long way around, it’s only going to get you killed.”

She makes a noise of frustration, finally raising her voice, but he does not flinch. “I’m not a _child!_ Damn it, I know!”

“I know you’re not. That’s why I’m so completely fucking astounded that I even have to have this conversation with you. You’re not an idiot, Ingrid. Don’t insult your own intelligence, and don’t you _dare_ call yourself weak.”

She wheels on him again. “Why does that offend you?”

“Because if _you’re_ weak, then what the fuck am I?”

Her mouth falls open as if she has been struck. He can visibly see the anger draining from her face. “Saldas, I—that’s not—”

Gods, she knows exactly what he meant, and if that doesn’t prove him right—she looks ready to cry, that was _not_ the intended effect, damn it—

“Don’t,” he sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose — _damn it, you're a blighted fool, Saldas_ — “Just... sit. We both need some rest.”

Shakily, she obeys. They sit in uncomfortable silence while the sun rises at their backs, and Ingrid takes deep, ragged breaths, trying to compose herself. Gentle snowflakes collect on every surface, congregating in his hair and settling into a fine layer on his clothes — it is such a simple thing, but as he watches the flakes descend, his ire slowly dies down. It is endlessly humbling, how calmly life goes on, regardless of the petty quarrelling of mortals.

“There was no fight,” she says at length, staring at the flecks of snow on her sleeves. “He didn't even see me as a threat, he just banished me before I could do so much as raise my axe.”

A chill spreads up his back. _That_ is a red flag if he has ever seen one. “Banished?”

Fear again, poorly disguised. She freezes up for a moment, then scrambles to regain her footing, “Threw me out, I mean.”

“Threw you out from _what?_ ”

“The temple, what else?” she says, not meeting his eyes, and it is probably technically not a lie.

But it _is_ a lie, nonetheless, and it puts a bitter taste in his mouth. If she is always so abysmal at the art of deception, then this is the first she has ever actually lied to him. He bites his tongue, physically restraining himself from calling her on it — instead, he fixes his stare on her averted eyes and holds it until her cheeks and ears turn red, making certain she _knows_ he has seen through her.

He sighs, and presses his fingers into his throbbing temples. This whole situation has been a disappointing revelation. He wonders what it takes for her to make that shift between reasonable and reckless — pride, arrogance, general inability to take a loss — whatever it is, she has done a damned good job of concealing it. That is not a promising trait, when applied elsewhere. This woman will be the death of him.

“You act like you've never failed before,” he says, not unkindly. “It was a bad call. Learn from it and move on. The only person blaming you is yourself.”

He can feel her eyes on him. “Why does that sound familiar?”

He huffs a bitter laugh. _I suppose I deserve that._

“When your bad decisions come with a body count, then you can come talk to me about how I'm a hypocrite. In the meantime, we should make something to eat.”

He stands to fetch his pack, and nearly doubles over, all of the colour draining from his face, and Ingrid catches him by the arm in an iron grip — oh, no no nonono this is the _worst_ time, he _just_ got done telling her to stop being irresponsible, _Saldas you stupid fucking blighted_ **_imbecile_ ** —

“When was the last time you ate something?” she asks, a thundercloud in her voice that reminds him a bit too much of when ama used to catch him reading in the small hours of the morning — he is on his hands and knees, head swimming, and the only helpful input from his brain is _shit, you’re in trouble._

“Ugh, _please_ don't make me answer that.”

 

She _does_ make him answer that, and he very nearly thinks she will cuff him on the ear for it, with how her round little face screws up with fury.

Her cooking is not terrible. Unpracticed, perhaps. He has had worse. He is just grateful for the effort, and for her discretion in not ripping him a new orifice. She would have a right to, really, but she holds her tongue on the matter, except to ask if he had slept at all while she was gone — _you woke me up,_ he says. _yes, but did you sleep at all before that?_ — and she didn’t quite like that answer, either.

She sheds her armor while she cooks, and the sleeves of her gambeson are still folded up to the elbows when she comes to sit beside him. She is paler above the wrist, but the fine golden hairs on her arms stand out against her skin in the firelight. The bruises have more or less gone, nothing more than a faint hue of yellow-green under the skin that will dissipate with time.

The sun peeks over the hills and spills through a gap in the clouds, pouring soft white light into the valley. Ingrid’s white-gold hair, tucked behind her ears and hanging in loose waves at her cheeks, is lit up like a halo while she cuts strips of smoked venison with his hunting knife.

Heart in his throat, he looks away.

 

Midmorning sees them checking their armor, smothering the fire, and packing up camp. He asks her if they need to return to town — a subtle inquiry into her condition, more than anything — and she declines, stating that she has more than enough supplies to get them where they need to go. He knows it is not about the supplies. They should both probably sleep, but Ingrid seems restless, itching for a fight, and Saldas needs to walk off some nervous energy anyway. Might as well, he thinks. They’re both already guilty of a little irresponsibility today.

She asks if there is a Nordic ruin to the north, and he almost laughs before he remembers she is still a newcomer here. _Which one?_ he asks, smirking, and she shoulders him for it. She does not know the name, or anything beyond vague secondhand descriptors. Something about a memorial of sorts, words etched into a stone monolith. He does not think he knows of any such thing, but he is willing to help her look, however fruitless and time-consuming the endeavor might turn out to be. If it keeps her away from Miraak for a while, it certainly can’t hurt.

The closest and most reliable path takes them west through the Moesring mountains, far too close to the temple for his liking. The sound of striking hammers, rhythmic and mocking, follows them all the way to the pass, and he cannot help but remember, with chilling clarity, that horrible prickling at the base of his skull.

Frigid though it is, Saldas has to admit that this island can be stunningly beautiful when it wants to be. The sky above the pass is wide and clear, bright white sunlight blazing through the naked facets of the glaciers and lighting them up like Welkynd stones, bathing the snow around them in blinding shades of blue — he sees now why he was so compelled to use such an analogy for Ingrid’s eyes.

The _wind,_ though. Fuck, the wind. It howls through the glacier pass, kicking up loose snow and blowing it into his eyes, stinging his cheeks, burying itself into his clothes. He pulls his scarf up and around his head, holding it closed under his chin so the snow cannot wedge itself between the fabric and his cheeks. Ingrid takes one look at him, scowling ferociously and wrapped up like an elderly ashlander woman, and nearly pisses herself laughing.

Easily remedied with a little snow down the collar. The bruise is probably worth it.

 

“That over there is Mortrag Glacier — do you see that tallest peak, just a bit to the right?”

“Yes.”

“That’s Mount Frykte. There’s an aboveground ruin... why are you looking at me like that?”

“Do you speak Nordic?”

“No?”

“Your pronunciation is good. Sorry, continue.”

“Thank you. There’s an aboveground ruin on the far side of that mountain. Safest way there is to approach from the east, over there... and then straight north along the mountainside. If you’re looking for _conspicuous,_ that ruin’s your best bet. If it’s not what you’re looking for, we can always work east from there.”

“Will we make it by nightfall?”

“We can try.”

“That’s where we go, then.”

 

There are low-hanging clouds drifting in from the northwest as they descend into the eastern approach, blanketing the last dregs of sunlight in steely grey. Massive stone arches are cut out of the mountainside, worn smooth by wind and snow — the footpath to the ruin continues underneath them, so he takes them down the path, hoping it will offer some shelter from the wind.

Ingrid is acting strange. She sometimes gets these _moods_ where all she wants to do is cleave something in half — it is usually induced by frustration or boredom, easily alleviated by chopping wood or dressing small game, though there isn’t usually much left of whatever she puts her blade to, in the latter case. He has grown accustomed to this occasional overenthusiasm for something physical and violent, and the resulting giddy energy that surrounds her when a challenger appears.

 _This_ is not it.

She is twitchy. Distracted. Watching the skies.

Something bristles in the back of his mind, like he is forgetting an important detail, like he left clothes on the line, or a pot on the fire. Her anxious energy is putting him on edge, and he feels like he is going to have a fucking heart attack if she keeps this up.

“Ingrid—”

 _“Shh!”_ she hisses, finger to her lips. “I hear something.”

A massive shadow passes overhead, and his blood runs cold.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: anxiety attacks

9.

“Shor’s bones, Saldas, it's just a dragon.”

“ _Just_ —! It's a _dragon,_ there is no such thing as ‘just’ a dragon! There’s ‘oh, no, it's just a hawk’ and there is _‘that’s a fucking dragon,’_ there is no in-between!”

“It's just a _little_ dragon,” she tries to reason, as if that is not the stupidest fucking thing he has ever heard. “I've killed one twice as big as this, we'll be fine.”

“Yes, and I'm Tiber fucking Septim. _Fuck._ Has it seen us?”

“Not yet, I don't think.”

“Oh, that’s just—I can't—this is—this is too much, Ingrid, I can't do this.”

“Breathe,” she orders, laying a firm hand on his shoulder and pushing him to his knees. He almost protests, but, humiliating as this is, it forces the blood back into his labouring heart and he can almost feel his face again. He grasps the wall beside him to keep from crumbling to the ground, but it hardly helps — he gulps down shuddering breaths, fingers in the neck of his breastplate to pull it away from his chest even as it strains against the leather straps at his ribs, anything to make it _stop._

“I can't believe—”

“You're going to pass out again.”

“You can't expect—Ingrid, this is _insane._ ”

She kneels beside him when his balance wavers, looping her arm under his chest to spare him the indignity of falling on his face if he blacks out. “Look, with Miraak, I'm out of my depth. I will admit to that. But dragons are familiar territory for me. This is what I _do._ ”

“Forgive me for not believing you, but I—I can’t just—”

The damn thing _shrieks_ like some horrible daedric abomination — like that awful noise a cliff racer makes when you lop its tail off, like a hawk birthing a blighted clannfear — and he squeezes his eyes shut, shuddering as it echoes down the mountain. Ever since the rumours started to circulate, he has had _nightmares_ about these things, gruesome visions of those horrible claws prying the roof off his home and dragging him out by his ankles and— _fuck,_ he thinks he’s going to be sick.

“You can’t be serious about this,” he groans, head in hands. “Please tell me you’re not serious.”

She has set her sights on a dragon, and he is along for this fucking ride whether he likes it or not. Oh, but it’s just a _little_ dragon — blight take the damned things, if a twenty-foot wingspan is what qualifies as _little,_ he is probably better off throwing himself into the sea right now.

“Look, Saldas, I know this looks bad, but this is actually a _good_ thing.”

“ _How_ —the _fuck_ —”

“The etchings were only half of what I needed. I... I can’t really explain it to you, it won’t make any sense—”

Oh, there it is. There’s the catch. “You—you knew there was a dragon at the ruin—the whole time. Didn’t you?”

Sighing ruefully, she looks away. “I knew there was a chance.”

“Of course you did,” he hisses cruelly under his breath, a sudden boiling anger bubbling up in his chest.

 _—of course she would not fucking tell him, he would never willingly accept such a task._ _how far would she have let him go, blissfully ignorant of the danger? how close to the precipice of death would she let him walk before pulling him back from the edge? would she pull him back at all?—_

He forces down a deep breath, letting the flames thaw the ice from his limbs, and exhales shakily. He repeats this until the invisible hands come loose from his throat and he can trust himself to form intelligible sentences. “You realize we’re _both_ in danger now, don’t you?”

“I know,” she says, and there is sincerity in her voice. “I’m sorry.”

With some difficulty and the assistance of the nearby wall, he stands, shrugging her hand off his shoulder when he has found his footing.

“Saldas—”

He recoils when she goes to reach for him. “Don’t. You're going to get yourself killed. You're going to get _me_ killed. I can't...” _—no, he_ **_can_** _, and that is exactly the problem—_ “I'm _not_ doing this anymore, Ingrid.”

She pales. “Saldas, I can face it alone. I'm not asking you to come with me.”

“And what happens when that thing kills you and decides it’s still hungry? You were asking too much of me the first time you told me to wait, I am _not_ doing this again. This isn’t worth it. _Nothing_ is worth _that_ sort of death,” he barks, jabbing a finger in the direction the dragon had flown.

“Look, I know... I know this is a lot, and I know I’m not paying you enough to deal with this, but if you could just... _wait_ for—”

Furiously, he shrugs his pack off his shoulders and digs through it — the bag is still where he left it, wedged down the side, and he throws it into the snow at her feet. “Your coin does not buy my loyalty! I will _not_ follow you into Oblivion!”

Her face goes stone-still, eyes frozen wide. He realizes, belatedly, that it is the first he has ever dared to shout at her.

Her eyes fall to the sack of coin. He sees the change in her expression the moment she realizes that it is untouched, that it was _never_ about the coin, that no amount of gold will make him throw down his life for a woman he cannot trust.

There is a flicker of disappointment in her eyes, but it quickly distills into an empathetic sort of resignation. She sets her jaw. “I understand.”

She walks away.

He stares at her retreating back until it disappears in the curve of the mountainside.

When she is out of sight, he finally addresses the violent trembling of his hands, tightly folding his arms over his chest to hold them still. He is _right,_ damn it. He should not feel like a fool for drawing the line at certain death, he should feel like a fool for letting it go so far in the first fucking place.

He feels eyes on the back of his neck, sharp with motherly disapproval.

_You were a hero, once._

“I know,” he says aloud, vaguely relieved that no one is nearby to witness his descent into madness. He scrubs at his face with his dirty, bandaged hands and heaves an angry sigh, slumping to the ground against the cold stone wall. “I know, damn it.”

_You would not let her die._

“Oh yes, I would. If it means avoiding a violent, meaningless death, I would.”

_Then why can you not walk away?_

He sighs miserably, pressing the heels of his palms into his traitorous eyes. “I don’t _know._ ”

He shouldn’t leave it at this. He knows he could never live with himself if he walked away right now, but he is afraid of how many times he has had to redraw the line. He fears that if he keeps pushing forward, he will have to erase it entirely. He has been at the end of his rope for decades now, but every time his hand slips from the end, there is suddenly more to hold on to. How foolish he must be, to speak of boundaries when even _he_ does not know where they lie.

He reaches to push the scarf away from the prickling skin at the back of his neck and feels a tiny bone toggle that does not belong to any of his amulets. He pulls at the braided leather lash until a pendant comes up from the neck of his breastplate, a double-headed axe cast in bronze. He remembers her hand on his wrist, warm metal being pressed into his palm, _I’ll be back for this—_

A deafening thunderclap echoes through the valley, and he jumps to his feet, nearly slipping on the loose snow in his haste. For a moment, he is frozen, searching the sky in frantic bewilderment — the storm is still a ways off, it could not be thunder — but he gets a glimpse of movement at the mountaintop, and all of that tenuous resolve he had been building up begins to crack.

The dragon’s head turns, black eyes glittering hatefully in the distance. It is _enormous,_ all craggy white scales and twisted horns, old grey scars scoring its sides and shoulders — it is old, it has seen battle, and he is willing to bet a thousand drakes that it is not accustomed to losing. With one powerful beat of its wings, it soars down the sheer face of the mountain, wind buffeting the stretched hide like sails, and disappears beyond the stone arches.

Ingrid is too far ahead. He cannot see if she has found cover, or if the dragon has already overtaken her. There is another thunderous crack, loud enough to make him flinch and cover his ears, and cold tendrils begin to crawl up his limbs.

He has looked into the face of death before. He has faced overwhelming odds and survived, even with shaking hands and ice in his veins and only half a clue what he was doing, he _can_ do this — the question is not whether he is capable, it is whether he is _willing,_ and that is a _dragon, Azura preserve me, I can’t do this I_ **_cannot do this_** _—_

_You were a hero once._

“I know,” he cries, wretchedly. He pulls feebly at his scarf, loosening it around his neck even though he knows that is not what is making it so difficult to breathe. “I _know,_ damn it, I know I’m not much of fucking _anything_ anymore, I’m just a spineless, selfish piece of _shit,_ is that what you want to hear?” he shouts at the sky, cold air biting sharply at his damp cheeks. “I fucking _know!_ What more do you _want_ from me?”

The mountainside is lit up with what he immediately recognizes as firelight, and a great plume of acrid black smoke is caught in the wind.

_You would not let her die._

He stares at the smoke as it curls away. Another gout of flame flashes beyond the arches, and he can feel the heat from here, rough like nails on his face. He takes a step backward, cold sweat breaking out down his neck and shoulders, and he hears his mother’s voice in his head, sharp as a whip, _you are a dunmer, you do not fear fire—_

 _“Damn it!”_ he shouts, driving his fist into the stone wall beside him.

The pain is not extreme, but it is enough. The world shrinks down to just the trampled snow at his feet, the stinging of his knuckles, the sound of his frantic breathing and the wind howling through the pass. He takes advantage of the artificial calm while it lasts, gulping down a couple of deep breaths. He feels the ground thump with unnatural footfall beneath his soft-soled boots, and tries not to let the tremors crawl up his bones.

He starts down the path before he can change his mind.

 

The dragon does not see him approach. It is busy trying to rip the shield from Ingrid’s arm, or perhaps take the arm with it, with how it’s trying to dig its wing-claws into her stomach and thighs for leverage. The shield is fastened too tightly around her forearm for her to slip it free, and when the dragon lifts its head, she comes with it, kicking viciously at the soft hide of its throat. Her axe is in the snow beneath her dangling feet.

Saldas has never had much talent with magic. Ama was a legionnaire with as little interest in magic as an orcish forge-wife — she could produce enough flame to start a wood fire, but would not trust her life to it. Mum’s weapon of choice was a hundred pound longbow of Topal oak, and he was reasonably certain she did not even possess an internal reserve of magicka. He is _sensitive_ to magicka, sure, but his childhood was virtually devoid of magical instruction.

He has a memory like a steel trap, which is more often a curse than a blessing, but it comes in handy when memorizing high-level spells he rightfully doesn't have the talent to use — understanding how those spells work, on the other hand, is not a skill he has ever possessed. Magical theory is completely lost on him. But that never stopped him from pissing off every classically trained mage from the Colovian Highlands to Sadrith Mora just with his ability to remember things. He had picked up a few spells in Vvardenfell after being served his own ass once or twice, something small and painful to fall back on if his gear broke in the thick of battle, and a hefty but correspondingly costly Restoration spell that would keep his innards where they belonged. He had rather hoped that would be all he would ever need. But in the years that followed, when he lost full use of his left arm and could no longer lift a shield, he needed something that could take a hit. Like, for instance, a lesser daedra.

Three things happen in as many seconds. Ingrid wrestles free of her shield-strap, falling several feet to the ground. The dragon throws the shield and rears its head, jaws opening wide as if to bite. A portal to Oblivion roars open between them, and a frost atronach blooms into existence.

The dragon is unable to redirect its momentum before its face slams into the atronach’s armored midsection. It reels backward with a shrill yelp — the atronach stumbles, knocked off-balance while it was still orienting itself to the mortal plane, and Ingrid, winded as she is, has enough of her wits to scurry out of the way before it sprawls flat on its back.

She stands, covered in blood and snow and cradling her shield-arm to her stomach, and wheels to face him.

A blood-toothed grin spreads across her face.

“Well, don’t look at me!” he shouts, waving an impatient hand at the dragon at her back.

She throws back her head and _laughs,_ as if she knew he’d be back all along. She is mad, he decides. She is absolutely mad, and he is right there with her.

The atronach heaves itself up from the ground, ice hissing and popping, hairline cracks straining under the sheer mass of its body. The dragon fares far worse, huffing a painful-sounding sneeze and spraying a frothy mess of blood and saliva all over the atronach’s torso. The tip of its muzzle is misshapen, bleeding freely down the few fangs that did not break off on the daedric metal, and Saldas cannot help the cruel sort of satisfaction he gets from the sight.

_So it can bleed._

The atronach rears back with a spiked limb, lining itself up for a killing blow, but the dragon knocks it to the ground with the clawed joint of its wing, easy as tipping a bottle. It rips at the atronach’s limbs with its claws until it cracks and fizzles from the physical plane with a defeated hiss.

Ingrid takes advantage of the diversion to retrieve her axe and shield from the snow. Saldas almost stops her for fear that her arm might be broken, but she has it strapped on quicker than he can protest. She beats her axe against shield and bellows a Nordic battlecry — one he distinctly recognizes as, _“Victory or Sovngarde, motherfucker”_ — and rushes forward to drive the point of her axe into the dragon’s jaw.

It shrieks and wrenches its head upwards. Shuffling awkwardly backward, limbs clearly not suited to the task, it tries to unfurl its wings, a jumble of spindly bones in the mouth of the narrow pass. It raises its head far above Ingrid’s reach, sucking down a breath as if to drown her in fire.

“The wings, Saldas! Go for the wings!”

As she says this, he is already midway through lobbing a Firebolt at center mass — he tries to redirect it at the last second, and it lands at the joint of the shoulder, molten magicka spilling over the flesh and running down the surface of the wing.

A blinding surge of white knocks him on his back.

 

Vaguely, he hears the beating of wings.

Something hits him in the shin, and topples over next to him with a grunt.

“Up.”

He groans.

“Get _up._ ”

There is a thick carpet of hoarfrost clinging to his clothes, his hair, his face. He was lucky enough to have raised a hand to shield himself on reflex, or his eyes would be frozen shut.

There are hands on his shoulder, rolling him off his pack and onto his side. He is pulled to his feet. He finds his footing midway through, blinking the windblown snow from his eyes and grasping for his bearings.

 _Find the dragon._ There is a smear of blood on a nearby wall, claw marks deep in the stone. The smell of burning flesh lingers on the wind.

“Where?” he croaks, too cold and disoriented to form words.

“Up the mountain. We need to find cover.”

He does not know how long they walk until she ducks into a stone hut, pulling him in with her.

He is met with the sight of a withered corpse, standing in the shadows opposite them, and is momentarily frozen in shock. He grasps at Ingrid's forearm, turning her toward it for lack of words. It only takes her a fraction of a second to read his expression. She turns just as it begins to nock an arrow in its bowstring, and punches it squarely in the face.

It crumples to the ground, stunned and flailing, and she stomps its throat with a dry crunch. He stares in horror at the fading blue light in its eyes. “What the fuck is that?”

“Draugr,” she grunts, ripping the bow from its rigid grasp.

Somewhere outside, rocks clatter down the mountainside.

“Didn’t get the wing, I take it?” he asks, shivering.

“No, you got it. The wing ripped, it’s just sitting on the mountain out of my reach. Can you manage any more fire?”

“Probably not. I wasted a lot of magicka on that atronach.”

“Worth it, I think.” She tests the draw weight — it’s a tight draw, and she seems pleased, a little smirk tugging at her lips. She slips the quiver off the draugr’s shoulder and checks each arrow.

“What are you doing?”

She gives him a mischievous grin. “I’m going to shoot it down.”

 _If the bow doesn’t collapse into dust,_ he almost says. The wood is grey-green with age, likely rotted under the rusted iron fastenings. But he has learned his lesson about arguing futility with her. He huffs a dry laugh. “This ought to be interesting.”

If she takes any offense to his lack of faith, she doesn’t show it. She ducks out of cover and draws the bow — her shield-arm shakes a bit, but she grits her teeth and bears it. She has expert form, but the bow sounds like shit, and he is certain he can hear the wood cracking as she looses an arrow. It’ll probably explode in her hands before she empties the quiver. The dragon growls in the distance, but doesn’t sound like it is coming down from its perch.

There is still the pervasive chill in his bones to address. He shrugs off his pack and digs through it with numb fingers, checking the breakable things for casualties. The mazte is fine — praise Azura, if they survive this, he will most certainly need a drink — but two of the healing potions are crushed, soaking everything below them in cloyingly sweet-smelling liquid. There is a crack in the paralyzing poison, which he only realizes when he pulls it from the bag and it springs a rapid leak.

He swears under his breath, throwing the bottle to the side. The potions have soaked through the bag of saltrice at the bottom of his pack. He might be able to salvage some, but he does not know how long the poison has been leaking, and he is not particularly keen on taking more risks than necessary. They will have barely enough to make it back to town, and that is _if_ they ration well.

“Half the food’s ruined,” he informs her as he digs out pieces of dark glass, careful not to cut his fingers on the edges. “Lost a couple of healing potions, too, so try to play it safe.”

“Safer than usual?” she asks as she looses another arrow.

He rolls his eyes, not dignifying that with a response. He digs further and finds the Resist Frost potion he had been saving, still intact. He downs half of it and offers the rest to Ingrid when she returns to cover to check the bow.

“Here.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know about you, but I can’t feel my hands. This’ll help.”

“No, you take the rest. I’m alright.” She makes a show of brushing the snow off her cloak. “It’s just like winter back home.”

“Exactly. Take it.”

“By that, I mean ‘annoying, but survivable.’”

 _For you, maybe,_ he thinks bitterly, but she pointedly pushes the bottle back into his hand. He drinks the rest and does not admit that he probably needed it. It goes down like fire, but it’s hardly worse than the cheap rotgut he used to drink back home, and it immediately puts some colour back into his cheeks. He clenches and unclenches his hands until he can feel warmth flooding back into them, prickling horribly. “Where did that come from?”

“Where did what?”

“The frost. I didn’t see where it came from.”

“The dragon,” she says, looking at him as if she fears he has hit his head a bit too hard.

He remembers the massive gout of flame that had lit up the mountainside, and furrows his brow. “Don’t dragons breathe fire?”

“Not all of them. Why?”

“But I... never mind. What’s it doing?”

“Perching. Getting tired, though.”

“And what are _we_ doing?”

“Waiting.”

“For what?” he asks, leaning around the edge of their cover in time to see the dragon slip from its footholds, plummeting to the ground amidst a shower of rock fragments and snow. _“Oh.”_

The impact shakes the ground so hard that he instinctively checks the mountain for cracks in the snow. Ingrid slips past him. When he is reasonably certain the snow pack will not come down on their heads, he follows.

They dispatch a pair of draugr on the way up the stairs. Ingrid’s movements are beginning to show impatience, growing more clipped and ruthless as hindrances present themselves. There is an itch in his mind to reach out and stop her, to slow her down before things get out of hand, but the thought is lost as they approach the second landing.

He can hear it breathing. It is a painful, wet sound, as if bobbing at sea and trying to keep its head above the surface — amidst the mass of spines on its back, he can make out the fletching of two arrows, both expertly placed right beneath the shoulder blades. One wing is clearly broken, crumpled beneath its body. The place his Firebolt had landed is torn wide open by the unnatural angle, showing too much muscle and bone. It is weary, and dying. And it is _looking at him._

Ingrid notices that he has not left the stairs. He has not even stepped up to the landing, his gut turning violently at the realization that _that thing is sentient,_ a thought he had not even bothered to consider while they were hacking it to pieces. There is an intelligent indignance in its eyes, outrage at its defeat.

But there is also fear. He remembers that sick satisfaction he felt at the realization that it could be defeated, at the blood that streaks its face, its neck, its white-scaled sides. He remembers staring down at broken bodies, covered in blood to the elbows and flooded with the realization that he had become a monster to destroy monsters.

It speaks, and he feels faint.

**_“Zu’u gahvon, thuri.”_ **

It is a sound like stone and thunder, reverberating through his bones even though its voice is thin and crackling with blood deep in the lungs. Ingrid is not facing the dragon, and she does not even blink when the words roll out of its mouth—she _knows_ they speak, _why did she not tell him—_

He takes a reflexive half-step backward and feels the edge of the step beneath his heel. In the split second before he loses his balance, Ingrid grabs him by the wrist and pulls him forward onto the landing. She takes him firmly by the arms and places herself in front of him, breaking his line of sight and blocking the dragon’s accusatory gaze. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” he says, firmly, though he knows he is shaking, and he knows she can feel it. Vertigo lingers like icy fingertips on his spine, and he leans into her perhaps a bit more than he should, but he holds his ground.

**_“Uv lost hi bo... wah beyn zey... ahrk du dii rii?”_ **

Saldas watches her critically, trying to parse a translation from the lines in her face. “What is it saying?”

She does not answer, but there is a flicker of muscle in her jaw that tells him she _does_ understand. The dragon _laughs_ until it devolves into a fit of wet coughing, spraying frothy blood across the snow.

 _ **“**_ ** _Hin fahdon los faas._ ** **He does not have the heart... to kill that which can no longer fight. Strange... Where was that compassion when he took my wing?”**

It takes him a moment to realize the dragon is talking about _him,_ and he feels his face go white as parchment. Ingrid turns, hissing a rebuke in the dragon’s own tongue, _“Hi togaat wah krii mu,_ do not ask for pity now, you stupid wretch,” and he does not even have it in him to be surprised. There is an undercurrent of _something_ in her voice, something that rattles his nerves.

 _ **“**_ ** _Geh, geh..._** **it is what we do, is it not?”** There is familiarity in its tone, a touch of fondness beneath the bitter veneer of resentment. **_“Hi bo wah du zey. Zu’u bo wah qahnaar hi... ahrk zu’u los qahnaar fah dii pahlok. Zu’u bolog..._** **do not make me speak any longer,** ** _thuri._** **Let me meet my death with dignity.”**

He cannot watch any longer. He turns away, the northerly wind biting sharply at his cheeks as Ingrid takes her axe in hand. He closes his eyes as if it will also close his ears to the sound of blood spattering stone.

There is a sound like rushing wind. There _is_ wind, blowing in from the sea, but this is not the same.

He turns. Ingrid stands at the dragon's head, blood dripping from her axe. There is a surge of... he is not sure if it is light, but _something_ twists and stretches from the dragon's maw, whipping at her bearskin cloak, her white-gold hair, the ends of her threadbare scarf. It coils like a serpent around her, and diffuses into her skin.

She glows. Like sunlight shines through her.

He has seen enough for today. She turns, and, upon seeing his expression, tries to speak to him, to explain, but he raises a hand and silences her with a weary shake of his head. She closes her mouth without speaking and joins him as he descends the stairs, still red-faced and radiating golden light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: My Dovahzul is absolutely atrocious, so if you have a better grasp of the language than I do, please (please) feel free to correct my grammar/let me know if it's completely unintelligible.
> 
> Also, upped the rating due to gross descriptions and Saldas' mouth.


	10. Chapter 10

10.

He starts shaking again about halfway back to the pass. Ingrid notices, she _always_ notices, but he waves her off when she reaches for him. It might be guilt in her eyes, but it is close enough to pity that he feels a swell of annoyance in his chest, unbidden and contentious — perhaps it proves Teldryn right in calling him a stubborn old fool, but he is _not_ made of glass, and he does not want her to assume he is falling apart every time he begins to shake.

“I’m fine,” he insists. “It’s just catching up to me, is all.”

She feigns a smile, squinting into the wind. “Thrill wear off already?”

He laughs, a little unsteadily. “Implying that it was ever there to begin with.”

“I’ll try to give you a warning next time.”

“Please.”

 

They camp in the anteroom of a massive Nordic barrow as the blizzard from the northwest begins to encroach on their backs. He sits cross-legged on his folded bedroll while Ingrid stokes the fire. He is properly sore for the first time in a long time. He silently ruminates on the feeling, the slight burn in his thighs and calves. It’s unpleasant, but it’s a good kind of unpleasant. Reminds him he’s alive.

The walk gave him quite a bit of time to think. Though the unfortunate revelation of the dragon’s sentience was what put the bad taste in his mouth, the lack of understanding is what keeps it there. He has seen his share of outrageous things — things that defy explanation, things he cannot quantify — but he somehow ended up with more questions than he started with, and he feels like answering any one of them will only sprout a hundred more. He doesn’t _like_ not being able to make sense of things. He is just not sure that the answers to these questions will be of any satisfaction to him.

It would be so easy to make this worse. Willful ignorance is such a tempting solution. But he is not a fool, and he cannot ignore what he has seen. He stares down at his open palms, at the dirt caked to the bandages and dried healing draught, reminding himself that _that actually happened. That was real._

Ingrid watches him cautiously while he pulls the jug of mazte, still tacky, out of his pack.

“Saldas...”

He holds up a finger to silence her for a moment, pops the cork, and chugs directly out of the bottle. When he lowers it, Ingrid's eyes are a little wide, but she wisely holds her tongue.

“Continue,” he says, voice a bit rough. He reads guilt in her eyes when she looks away.

She exhales slowly, some of the tension in her posture riding out on the breath. “You were right. About the temple. I knew I was in over my head, I just... I wanted it to be _over._ I wanted to end it before anyone else got hurt, even if that meant getting myself killed in the process.” She pauses. She pokes at a log in the fire, turns it over, but does not acknowledge his blatant stare. “You were right about the dragon, too. I should’ve told you, and I shouldn’t have pushed you so far. I haven’t treated you fairly at all, and you don’t deserve that. I’m sorry.”

That is a more... _comprehensive_ apology than he had expected. He stares at her for a moment, eyes narrowed. “What prompted this?”

She glances up at him, warily. “I’ve never seen you angry. Not like that. I feel silly for it now, but at the time... I didn’t realize I was being so selfish, expecting you to follow me blindly just because I threw a little gold at you. I know that’s not an excuse, but...”

A pang of guilt stabs at his gut, an ugly little voice inside him hissing _you shouted at her, you fucking fool, if she didn’t fear you before, she certainly does now_ — “I wasn’t... I wasn’t _angry,_ Ingrid.”

She gives a skeptical flick of her brow.

“I _never_ raise my voice when I’m angry. Ever. I— _yes,_ I was upset when I realized you knew about the dragon, but—” He privately curses himself. He cannot tell her that he deliberately fed into it. It was cruel of him, and she would not understand. “I really wasn’t even angry anymore at that point, I know it might’ve seemed that way, but I was just..."

_Admit it, you coward, admit you were scared,_ his mind unhelpfully suggests, but the word dies in his throat. There is a beat of silence, and he knows Ingrid is staring at him without having to meet her eyes. He can feel it on his skin like an itch.

He cannot look at her. He buries his face in his hands, wishing he could just melt through the cracks in the floor. “I still shouldn’t have shouted at you. I _am_ sorry for that, if I haven’t said it yet.”

“It’s... you’re not in the wrong here, Saldas.”

But he _is._ She apparently does not believe they can both be simultaneously in the wrong, but they are, and he should be allowed to explain himself. He wants her to understand, _that’s not who I am, please don’t think I’m some sort of brute,_ but the window of opportunity closes when she begins speaking again, abruptly and intentionally turning the conversation elsewhere.

“I guess it didn’t occur to me that you’ve never actually seen a dragon before. I seem to have forgotten how terrifying they used to be.”

_Used to, she says._ He peers up at her through his fingers. “I have nightmares about them, you know.”

“Do you?”

He nods. “Ever since the sailors started talking about the attacks in Skyrim. Part of me didn’t believe the rumours. I thought a particularly ambitious cliff racer made it over the mountains or something,” he admits, and that startles a laugh out of her. “Yeah, go on and laugh, it was a more plausible assumption at the time. News doesn’t get up here very quickly.”

She grins teasingly. “Were they everything you imagined?”

“They don’t _move_ quite the way my mind conjured up. Then again, the only real frame of reference I had was the statue of Akatosh in Talos Plaza, so I imagined them a bit more like that. Longer, more slender, less... big. _Azura,_ how do you even get used to something like that?”

She shrugs. “To know something you fear is to lessen it,” she says, and slowly furrows her brow. “That... doesn't translate well.”

“Cast light upon the dragon in the dark, and it is just a guar.” He smirks. “Same idea, but I think mine’s more fitting. Makes less sense in Cyrodilic, too.”

An incredulous grin toys at her mouth. “Are you already drunk?”

“No,” he gripes. “Unfortunately still sober. Just... too drained to be appropriately serious about all this, I suppose.” He sighs and runs his fingers through his hair, shame still gnawing like rats in his gut. “I know what you must think of me after these last few days. I promise I'm not normally this—”

“Don't you dare say it.”

“...Unstable. I wasn't going to say it.”

She eyes him critically. “I don't think you're unstable.”

“And why not? I've spent so much time panicking this past week that I'm not even sure I have any panic _left._ ”

“You're drunk.”

“Far preferable to moody and uptight, I think.”

Ingrid smiles and shakes her head, but does not try to deny it. She reaches to dig through her pack, and he catches her suppressing a wince when she turns her wrist. He holds out an expectant hand. Side-eyeing him through her pale lashes, she lets him push up her sleeve.

Azura’s mercy, now he sees why she had been avoiding this. The bruising is bone-deep, purple and swollen and rippled with red and white along the edges. It is horribly distended where the strap scraped down her forearm, and gods, it _looks_ broken. He would question its integrity if not for having already seen it stand up to a warbow’s weight. He tries to gauge what’s left of his magicka — some of it was replenished during the walk, but not as much as he would like. Not _nearly_ enough to handle this.

He is not a healer, per se, but he has lived through enough painful trial-and-error to have a functional knowledge of the craft. He feels along the bones underneath, channelling a bit of healing through his fingertips as he goes. Ingrid is taking it stoically, but he has had similar injuries before, and he knows how badly it must hurt — when he gets closer to the elbow, she reaches for the bottle of mazte, uncorks it, and tips it into a tankard with one hand.

“That bad?”

She nods with a mouthful of liquor, jaw set when she swallows. “Yeah. Didn’t feel it earlier, but y’know.”

“Thrill wear off already?”

She laughs through her teeth, masking a wince. “Fuck off.”

He decides to pour the remainder of his magicka into her elbow, gently testing the movement as he does so to avoid accidentally fusing the bones. She winces as it moves, but eventually her jaw unclenches and her breathing sounds less pained.

“I owe you an explanation, don’t I?” she asks when the last of his magicka sputters out, cold tankard pressed to her temple.

“You don’t owe me anything,” he replies on reflex, only regretting his dismissive tone after the words leave his mouth.

“Who was it that said we need to be on the same page?” There is a vague warning in her voice, a _do not disregard me again_ that he reflexively stiffens at. He heeds the warning and shuts his mouth.

Ingrid places her drink on the ground, fingers idly tracing the rim. She does not look at him, but he reads regret in the downturned corners of her mouth and the furrow of her brow. “You’ve asked me about Miraak before, and I answered, but... when you said you didn’t want to know how I factored in, it was too easy to just take you up on the offer. I should have told you then, but I didn’t. What you said this morning, about knowing your enemy... you were right, and I didn’t realize that I was depriving _you_ of that knowledge because I had my head too far up my own arse.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” he mumbles in her defense, shifting uncomfortably.

She shakes her head. “You deserve the truth.”

“Yes, I do. But don’t be so quick to tell me something you’ll regret later.”

“Why would I regret it?”

“Because you hardly know me, Ingrid. We’ve known each other for a month.”

She looks up, hair falling messily at her cheeks, and she watches him for a moment. She is looking for something in his eyes.

“You told me you would not follow, and then you did it anyway. Forgive me if I trust you.”

The words, simple and easy as she says them, hit him like a spear to the chest. _You shouldn’t,_ he wants to tell her. _Please don’t._

“Did you ever wonder why I asked for silence in the first place?”

Of course he hadn’t. It had not been his place to speculate. “I... no.”

“I didn’t want you to get involved. I thought you’d just lead me where I needed to go, I’d give you the rest of your coin, and we’d go our separate ways. I didn’t expect...” She sighs miserably and runs her hands through her hair. He remembers her hand on his wrist, the pendant in his palm. Hesitance in her eyes. “Regardless. You _are_ involved, whether I anticipated it or not, and I can’t keep hiding things from you.”

She meets his gaze, fear and exhaustion and uncertainty in her eyes, and only now does he realize how much this mission has been affecting her. She’s _tired._ She is asking for his help, and as much as he is content to abide by his policy of _stay out of trouble,_ he knows he can help her — maybe not to the end of destroying Miraak, but he has been in her shoes before, and even something as simple as advice would be better than nothing at all.

He had said before that she does not need someone to hold her hand — partially because he walked a similar path alone and survived — but he wonders... what if he _had_ been offered solidarity? What if he had a hand to hold, someone to wander aimlessly through the ash _with,_ just to lighten the load? He, at least, had Varvur to confide in, and perhaps Cosades before he was recalled to Cyrodiil. He had friends on every coast, contacts in every settlement. She has _no one._

None that will talk to her, anyway. Ah, there, he feels like an idiot again.

This is an invitation, he realizes, one that she expects him to refuse. An invitation to pry, to ask, to understand. She wants to tear down the barrier between them, she is giving him the reins, but he just... _can’t._ Not yet. Not like this.

“I’m not expecting anything in return,” she says when he does not respond. “I would _like_ to know you, but... I understand that trust doesn’t come as easily to you.”

That is not a bargain she should have to make. He hopes she does not believe he would be so cruel as to put them on uneven ground. He lets out a shaky breath. “Listen... I know you want to talk about today — and we _will_ talk about it, don’t look at me like that, I just... a lot has happened today. A lot of things I thought I knew have been challenged, and I don’t think I can handle any more of that right now.”

She blinks. “Okay,” she whispers, as if she fears he will shatter if she speaks too sharply. He _really_ wishes she would stop looking at him like that. “That’s fine. It can wait ‘til we get back to town, if you’d like.”

He breathes a sigh of relief. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah. And... I think it goes without saying, but, you _really_ needn’t fret over me. I know I’ve not done much to prove it, but I promise I can handle myself.”

“I know. It’s been a bad week,” she says, but it still feels like pandering.

She has seen too many of the weak points in his armor, he thinks. He remembers all of the times she has silently watched him, mapping the places where his control wears thin, figuring out what makes him tick. She has seen him for what he is, a shadow of a mer inhabiting the shriveled molt of his younger self, and he has become something pathetic in her eyes, a piteous creature deserving of protection.

An ugly part of him wishes she had seen him in his worst hour, if only to gauge the bounds of her tolerance. Would she still coddle him, then, if she knew what he was capable of?

They end the night on a strange note. There is a minor scare — when Ingrid pulls the food from his pack and he is abruptly reminded that there is still an undefined amount of paralytic poison coating the inside of the bag — but when that is resolved, at the expense of the contents of his waterskin, they quietly eat what they could salvage of the food and settle in for the night. The silence is respectful, not quite as tense as he had anticipated, and Ingrid finally stops looking at him like an injured animal about halfway through her third cup of mazte.

He is the first to retire to bed. He wakes when Ingrid shimmies in behind him, still half-drunk and not quite aware of her limbs — she knees him in the back, once, and mumbles an apology, but eventually settles quietly into the furs.

When he begins to fall asleep again, he feels a gentle tapping on his shoulder.

“Saldas?”

He hums acknowledgement.

“Sorry if it’s too much to ask, but... could you make sure I don’t walk off again?”

She suddenly sounds very young. There is a vulnerability in her voice that he does not think he has ever heard. It sounds wrong. It hangs strangely on her, like an ill-fitting garment, tight and threadbare. He considers the options for a moment, thoughts still sleep-muddled, and reaches behind — or, at least, an inch or two past his hip, as far as he is able — to offer a hand.

“What?”

“I’m a light sleeper. If you move, it’ll wake me.”

“...You’re sure?”

“Yes. Can’t get much farther than that, though. You’ll have to come to me.”

Several silent seconds pass before the furs finally shift behind him. Warm fingers brush his palm — clumsily, likely still numb from the poison — and he laces their fingers together, tightly enough that he knows he will wake if she stirs. She settles against his back, warm and heavy, and they fall asleep like that, with Ingrid’s nose pressed against the scars at the nape of his neck.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: anxiety/panic attacks
> 
> Be advised — this chapter starts off with a rather severe panic attack. It was intended to be abrupt in relation to the previous scene, but I very much do _not_ want to catch anyone unaware with something that may prove triggering. Stay safe, everyone.

11.

He dreams of burning trees.

 

He wakes with a ragged gasp, drenched and shaking.

His mouth feels like ash. For one delirious, nauseating moment, his mind believes what he had dreamt was still real — he has himself pushed frantically upright before he realizes he is clutching, hard, to another warm and sweaty hand.

_Calm down. Breathe._

Carefully, he disentangles their fingers, and thanks every god and daedra he can think of that she does not wake. He draws his knees up to his chest, heart beating hard and fast, to ride out the shivers until the air feels less like poison in his throat.

_It’s over, it’s_ ** _over,_** _calm_ ** _down._** **_Breathe._**

It is too warm. The fire has burned down to embers, and the air is heavy with smoke _(ash scraping down his throat like glass)_ and he feels dread swelling in his chest until his lungs seize tight — the ground lurches, once, beneath him, and he knows what is coming before it actually begins. He stumbles shakily to his feet and shoves the doors of the barrow open.

The frigid dawn air does little to aid the tightness in his chest. He settles _(falls)_ to his knees where stone meets snow, focuses on the searing cold against his knees, his shins, the tops of his feet. Digs his nails into his palms. Breathes.

_It gets worse before it gets better,_ someone once told him, while he was still bedridden and half-mad from corprus. In a rare fit of lucidity, he had managed to remark, _I can’t help but wonder when it stops getting worse._

If this was new, it would not be quite so humiliating, but he has been this way since he was a _child._ He has _always_ been quick to panic. It’s like feeling the horse go rigid beneath him the moment before it begins to bolt — he has been here many times already, he _knows_ what comes next, the solution is there in his mind, _grab the reins close to the bit, control the head and you control the beast—_

—but now, the reins slip through his fingers. He doesn’t know what he’s doing wrong.

_There is no cure for corprus. Look, see, the lesions have stopped spreading — you’ll still need to have the tumors cut from your body, you’ll still need to be pruned and reshaped, you’ll still need to bleed in order to heal. You no longer feel the Sharmat in your head, like the quiet growth of mushrooms sprouting from your fetid, decaying body — eating holes in your sanity, your Will, your Self — but you’ve already lost so much of your mind that you don’t need his voice to tell you you’ll never be right again—_

**_Stop it._ **

_Stop. You’re_ **_fine._ **

He forcibly unclenches his hands. Inhales, counts to five — exhales, shakily. Repeats, until his lungs stop rejecting air.

_“Never shall you have your rule over me.”_ His Velothi is rough with disuse, Dunmeris-accented, but it is an act of defiance that gives him leverage. _“Never shall I tremble or flinch from your power.”_

Behind him, he hears bare feet padding softly on stone.

“Saldas?”

He flinches. Reluctantly, he glances over his shoulder. Ingrid is bundled in furs in the doorway, hair half-damp and plastered to her cheek.

“Did I wake you?” he asks, trying to marshal some semblance of control.

“No,” she says. “Sorry, were you praying?”

She knows. Her face is carefully passive, but it’s so obvious — he is drenched in sweat, breathing hard, crumpled on his knees in the snow at the break of dawn — that he cannot help but think she felt sorry enough to come up with an excuse _for_ him. Praying sounds better than reciting poetry, at any rate, so he takes the bone when she throws it.

“Sort of,” he manages, past the lump of shame in his throat. He takes a deep breath. Makes a decision. “You're... welcome to join me, if you’d like,” he adds, before he can lose his nerve.

“I don't want to intrude.” _Do you need a moment?_

“You're not.” _I’m okay. I promise._

The furs bloom around her hips when she sits. She gathers them up to cover her ankles, but leaves her feet bare, curling her toes on the snowy step. There are spidery red marks on her cheek to match his wrinkled linens.

“Pretty morning,” she says, squinting out at the trees, branches bowing low under the weight of the snow. “Always nice after a blizzard.”

He nods mutely.

She nudges him with her knee. “Aren’t you cold?”

“Yeah, that’s sort of the point,” he mumbles on reflex, then grimaces at his own tone. “Sorry. Yes, but I’m alright. I needed some fresh air.”

She nods, unperturbed at the slip. “Your clothes are drenched. It won’t do you well to sit in the cold like this.”

The way she says it is the same as when he offered to get the crack in her armor repaired, on the docks back at Raven Rock. It is not an order. It is simply a suggestion born of genuine concern, _I don't know why you're doing this, but please be careful._

It is only to equalize himself, to remove the memory of fire from his bones and start anew, lest that knot of dread follow him all the way to town. She doesn't know he will not fall ill from it, though. He does not feel like explaining that part of himself quite yet.

He breathes in — out, on six: steady, this time. _There. Better, see? What were you so fucking worried about in the first place?_

“You’re right. Come on, then. Let’s get the fire going.”

 

He fills the pot with the whitest snow he can find, taking handfuls from the top of a drift on the western-facing side of the barrow. The first pot goes to their waterskins when it has cooled. His is still empty from the night before, and Ingrid must have tried a second washing after he went to bed, because hers is nearly dry as well — it was a _powerful_ poison, and he catches her experimentally prodding her fingertips even now, while he fills the empty skins.

He plucks at his tunic while the second pot boils, wrinkling his nose at the unpleasant sensation of damp cloth peeling away from his skin. He could have done with a bath several days ago, but this time of year is still too cold to attempt such a thing outside. With the weather being what it is, he hadn’t thought to bring proper soap — he has a few dried herbs, though, and he would much rather smell like bitter herbs than a wild animal. When Ingrid turns away to roll and tie their bedding, he carefully removes the pot from the fire and adds the herbs — canis root and elves ear, to steady his hands — then pulls his tunic over his head, up and over from the right.

Two pendants fall to his chest. One, the Teeth of the Urshilaku — racer teeth and garnet and faded twine — hardly ever leaves his neck. Of all the things that tether him to his past, it is the only one that brings him comfort. It reminds him of warm southern breezes blowing through wooden chimes, the aroma of dry herbs and leather, the rhythmic scrape of the tanner’s knife. It reminds him of Nibani Maesa’s soft, wrinkled hands. Of her voice, still clear in his memory, bestowing words upon him that he used to deserve — things he still strives to be, things like _humble_ and _gentle_ and _kind_ — something like a mother, when he so desperately needed one.

He unfastens the bone toggle on the second pendant, the amulet, and examines it in his palm — _brass,_ he realizes, not bronze, on account of the dull black tarnish it has accumulated since he last examined it. He keeps reminding himself to return it, but never seems to get the chance.

He wrings his washcloth until it is damp and carefully wipes sweat and dirt from the braided lash. When he has finished bathing — carefully, as his scars are more tender to the interplay of cold air and scalding water now that his nerves have calmed — he walks to the far side of the anteroom, where Ingrid quietly chews a strip of smoked venison, and offers the amulet over her shoulder.

She leans her head back until it bumps against his thigh. Her gaze flicks to his scars — the patch of pink on his shoulder and chest, the mangled mess of his left arm — and abruptly back to his eyes. The wall snaps up before her expression has a chance to betray anything.

“Did you clean this?” she asks, her tone very carefully light, but he hears the tightness high in her throat.

He lets her play it off. He does not fault her for her visceral reaction, and the scars do not embarrass him as much as they used to. “Yeah. Got something for the tarnish, too, but it’s at the house. Remind me when we get back, yeah?”

“Oh, you don’t have—”

“It’s no trouble, stop fretting,” he insists, and nudges her in the back with his knee. “The water’s clean. Should be warm by now. If you want to spend the next three days smelling like the back end of a guar, that’s your prerogative, but I want to get out of here by mid-morning.”

“I do _not_ —”

He gives her a flat look. She sniffs her tunic.

“ _Ugh._ Mara’s tits, that is a bit gamy, isn’t it?”

 

When their clothes have dried and the fire burns down for a second time, they set out. The sky is clear and blue. There is a breeze drifting in from the south that is at least attempting to be warm — the snow is already beginning to turn to slush, caving in upon itself wherever the sun touches it, and there are enough bare patches that they are spared the trouble of getting their boots wet. Aside from the humid cold, it is turning out to be a pleasant morning. Though they will have to backtrack through Moesring Pass — they cannot follow the coast down, unless they feel like wading past the cliffs west of Fahlbtharz — he does not find himself dreading the walk.

Ingrid talks. She has a horse back home, a grey cob with a droopy lip who once ate the summer’s first blackberry pie through her mother’s kitchen window. She talks with her entire body when she gets inspired, regaling him with claims of a sockeye she caught one summer that was _this fucking big, I swear to you,_ of her and her cousins drunkenly daring each other to roll bare-backed in the snow, of wrestling with the hounds in the fall.

She tells him that the war was still on when she was young — she is older than he thought, then, certainly no younger than thirty-five — and she tells him how her mother’s forge was always hot, shaping swords for the Legion. They would find wee little foxes sleeping on the stone in the winter, leaching the heat. She used to place her little hands on the rocks to see how long she could stand it — _dragon-skin,_ her mother called it. She laughs at a joke he suspects he is missing.

He doesn’t respond beyond quiet acknowledgement, but she doesn’t seem to expect him to. It is as if she knows he would not know what to do with silence, so she has taken it upon herself to fill the space for him, chattering idly as the sun arcs over their heads.

As they stop to rest beside a dwemer tower on the western side of Mount Moesring, where the ash and snow has turned to cold, gritty mud, the conversation — a conversation now, not one-sided rambling — turns back to the war. He had not been in Tamriel-Proper for any of it, but oh, he had heard. Her father had been a soldier in the Legion, garrisoned in Bravil, which — as he recalls from the last hurried letter he received from his last living contact in Cyrodiil, before all correspondence went dark — was one of the first cities to fall.

“I grew up hearing my father wake screaming in the middle of the night,” she says, through a mouthful of smoked venison — so casually, as if it is no matter at all, as if it doesn’t affect her beyond objective acknowledgement. It _does,_ though. He sees it in her eyes.

He knows _exactly_ what she is saying, and the implication drives a cold javelin into his stomach, wrenches the air right out of his lungs — it hasn’t been that bad in _years,_ he was doing _so well,_ how long has he—

“I’m—I’m sorry,” he stutters, breathless, “I didn’t realize I—”

She shakes her head. “No. You—you misunderstand. You haven’t. You don’t. It’s just... not a great stretch of imagination to figure out why you can’t sleep at night.”

She does not look at him. She knows she is exposing him, and is sparing him the humiliation of having to meet her eyes while she lays him bare. She gives him time to catch his breath, a moment to process what she is telling him.

“I saw how my mother helped him,” she continues, quietly, as she re-wraps her ankles, “and I saw that sometimes she could not. I didn’t mean to patronize you. It was not my intent. I was only trying to figure out what helps, and what doesn’t.”

_She was trying to be kind. She was only trying to be kind._

He is silent for a long time. He does not know what to say — his instinct is to apologize, but he knows she would chide him for it, and thanking her seems strange. So he stays silent, until Ingrid pushes a strip of venison into his hands.

“You haven’t eaten yet.”

“Sorry,” he says, on reflex, then winces when she opens her mouth to scold him for it. “Sor—thank you.”

She shakes her head, but there is laughter in her eyes. “Why do you apologize so much?”

He shrugs, ignoring the swell of heat in his cheeks. He bites off a piece from the strip. “Habit.”

She raises her brow.

“I’ve always been too much of something or another,” he explains. “Too tall, too quiet, too faint of heart, too grey. Not grey enough. I learned that if I apologized for existing, people stopped faulting me for it.”

The admission wounds her more deeply than he had intended. In the corner of his eye, he can see her watching him, silent and grim.

“Quit trying to pick me apart,” he mumbles, only half-joking. She huffs a little laugh, matching his wry smile. “Alright, _up._ That’s enough of that. We’re burning daylight.”

 

They trudge through mud until mud becomes ash, becomes trees, becomes dark. There is an unease in the pit of his stomach, a tickling sensation somewhere between fatigue and nausea that he does not immediately recognize as hunger — _it’s always worse when you eat, you should have just waited_ — and they are both doing their best to direct their irritability away from each other. Two days will not kill them. Ingrid takes it out on the tent-stakes, and he stays out of her way.

They have sleep for supper and head out as soon as the sun rises. It is humid and warm — still below freezing, as evidenced by frost in the shadows of trees, but warm in comparison to frost on eyelashes — and the day drags and drags until the problem of hunger solves itself.

Ingrid watches in disgust while he butchers the pair of ash hoppers, nursing her bitten leg. He is almost certain she would rather go hungry than eat like an ashlander — _look, you finally get to try bug meat,_ he says, and she throws a tiny stone at him, probably because she cannot reach her axe — but pickings are slim, and beggars cannot be choosers.

The legs boil in a shallow pot of water. While wild yams roast in the embers, he cooks the mangled fillets on a flat stone, turning them with his bare fingers until the texture is more agreeable. Ingrid narrows her eyes at the meat, as if she can intimidate it into becoming salmon or beef.

“It doesn’t taste like much of anything,” he assures her, amused at her open scrutiny.

“That’s not— doesn’t that _hurt?_ ”

“A little.” He pulls the yams out of the fire, brushing embers from the skins before dropping the smaller two in her bowl. It _does_ sting, and the numbing burn remains on his fingertips for a while after, but he knows how much he can handle before actually hurting himself. A little pain never killed him.

She makes a face when he offers her a crumbling slice of white meat, but hunger and manners outweigh revulsion, and she accepts it with a grateful nod. She tenderly picks apart the filet and steaming yams while he fixes his own meal, and only tries the meat when she is satisfied at his lack of reaction to the taste.

She chews thoughtfully. “Well, it definitely tastes like _something._ ”

“Does it, now?” he teases, and pops a piece into his mouth.

“Like... I don’t know — crab-meat and... Breton spices, I think? It’s very strange.”

“Funny, I always thought it just tasted like shit,” he says, and Ingrid nearly chokes from laughter.

They wolf down their food as soon as it has cooled. They abstain from drink, as their waterskins are growing light and alcohol would only dehydrate them further — that, and Saldas does not want to admit that he has been relying on it too heavily, as of late.

The mazte is too weak a spirit to be put to use at cleaning Ingrid’s wounded leg — a shallow bite, but still a risk — so he uses a portion of his water to wash the wound, then closes it as best he can with magic. It heals pink and tender, but the edges touch where they should. He’ll brew her something to eliminate the possibility of fever when they get back to town, but with the amount it bled, he doubts it will fester at all.

With a linen rag, he wipes the blood from between his fingers. “I’ll set up camp. Stay here.”

“Let me help.”

“No.”

“I’ve been sitting too long,” she complains, but he levels her with a glare.

“You get up, and I’ll sweep your legs.”

“You’d better not,” she warns with an ill-concealed grin, but abandons any further argument.

His knees protest when he stands — though his face might have been spared most of the proof, he _is_ getting old, and he certainly feels his age. He does look a little older than he did when the years left him behind, if only by a decade or two — enough to prove that he is immortal, but not invulnerable. Every time he comes across someone who has known him for more than a handful of years, it’s always _gods, you look so_ **_tired_** _, don’t you ever_ **_sleep_** _,_ as if he doesn’t already know he looks like death. He _knows._

Ingrid watches from her perch against a nearby tree, fur cloak bundled ‘round her neck and shoulders like the ruff of a nesting bird.

“Saldas?”

He hums acknowledgement.

“Do you miss Morrowind?”

His hands falter at the tent stakes. “Yes. Very much so.”

She chews her lip. “And Cyrodiil?”

His brow furrows, a chill creeping up his spine. “Who told you I was from Cyrodiil?”

“Your accent,” she says, with a trace of tentative amusement. She is being honest. “The more you use the Emperor’s tongue, the more it suits you.”

“...Ah. Well.” He busies his hands, the tiny pinpricks of panic slowly subsiding. The chill remains. “Why do you ask?”

She shrugs, cheeks lost in fur. “Curious. Why not go back?”

_Go back to what?_ he almost asks, but he tamps down the words before he misdirects his bitterness at her. In truth, he does not have the heart to tell her that the Morrowind he misses does not exist anymore — to say nothing of the Cyrodiil he knew as a child, a victim of changing times.

He is damned tired of wounding her with every word that leaves his mouth. He keeps his grief to himself, this time.

“This is home, now. I suppose.” It is a poor excuse, he knows, but he cannot think of a more convincing one while homesickness weighs so heavily.

“You’re miserable here,” she says. It is not a question.

“Yes,” he admits, because there is no point in lying.

“But you stay? Even with knowledge of the danger?”

For a moment, he thinks she only means the danger of bitter cold, of ash storms and outlaws and a crumbling bulwark — perhaps more abstract things, like starvation or economic collapse, always looming on Raven Rock’s horizon. Somehow, he had almost managed to put the threat of Miraak out of his mind, lost in the complete pandemonium of recent events — he is reminded, abruptly, of the absolute helplessness at watching his friends and neighbours be _used_ like _cattle,_ the rising dread at the knowledge that it’s getting worse and there is not a blighted thing he can do about it—

He bites his lip, hard, until the feeling clears. _Enough. She asked you a question. Answer it._

“Yes.”

She is quiet — he must have put a little more bite in it than he thought. He reconsiders his answer.

“I... would like to leave, I think. It would be easy enough — I can afford it, you’ve seen how I live — but with everything that’s going on... I can’t exactly evacuate an entire island, but I also can’t just _go_ and pretend none of this is happening. I’ve never been tolerant of that ‘someone else’ll do it’ guarshit. Now that I know there _is_ something I can do about it, how could I walk away?”

But oh, he had thought about it. He didn’t — but gods, he _thought about it,_ he actually considered running scared and sticking his head in the sand somewhere in Morrowind like the blighted coward he really is.

But he didn’t. He hopes that is enough.

She nods, slowly. “You know you’re not obligated to do this, don’t you?”

He _is,_ though. He was a  _hero,_ once. “I know.”

“I know this has been taking a lot out of you. If you don’t think you can—”

“I _can._ ”

“Okay... okay. I just had to make it clear.”

“I know. I’m— thank you, but I’m fine.”

Selfish as his reasons are, he _needs_ to do this. He needs to prove to himself that he still has it in him, that he is not just a relic of a bygone era. He needs to prove that he’s still _useful._

And as much as he has kept the people around him at an arm’s length, they’ve been good to him. He owes them this.

They sleep, with the comfort that they’ll be in real beds tomorrow.


End file.
